Carnal Knowledge
by superscar
Summary: 494 goes AWOL to save Rachel's life. He knows he can't survive outside Manticore. He knows he shouldn't be so open with the girl he meets at the hospital. He's absolutely going to die. Unless everything he knows is wrong. Max/Alec
1. Chapter 1

The explosion knocked his world off its axis.

Light blackened his vision. A whoosh of hot air burned over his skin as 494 lifted his arm automatically, protecting his face. The sound was deafening at close range and distantly, he could hear screaming through the rain of shrapnel. His eyes opened just in time to see Rachel's head bounce off the cobblestone of Berrisford's fancy driveway. He was too late even as he ran toward the burning car, ignoring years of training and every instinct of self-preservation. The world blurred around him as he moved, though whether it was from the speed or the burning in his corneas, he couldn't tell. Neither did he care.

He had seconds, if that. The bomb had been planted under the passenger door. It wouldn't be long before the fire hit the gas tank and set off another explosion, an intentional design to keep people away and prevent exactly the kind of rescue attempt that 494 was trying.

Blood pooled under Rachel's head and her eyes were closed almost peacefully, as though she'd decided it was time for a nice nap before her piano lesson. He threw his body over her, protecting her face from the second blast that burned it's way up his body, singeing the hair from the back of his neck.

He could hear footfalls approach from a distance at a run, but didn't get up. They had numbers, a plan of attack and significant experience dealing with soldiers of his skill set. They would know, as he did, that their only real means of controlling the situation would be a taser, either up close or fired at a distance. Twelve feet out, they stopped.

But it wouldn't have made a difference for them either way.

**Carnal Knowledge**  
by scarlet (superscar)

Chapter One_  
_

_Seattle, Washington - 2019  
Harbor Lights Hospital_

Even as 494 ran through the doors of the Emergency Room with Rachel in his arms, screaming for help, he took in every detail of the space surrounding him. He'd been trained to keep thinking, to re-evaluate the situation at every moment in a changing environment. People filled the small room. Some sat in chairs in the lobby and others complained loudly at a desk surrounded in glass that he could only assume was bullet proof.

He nudged his way to the front of the line, kicking those who wouldn't move voluntarily.

"You think I'll call a doctor or security?" an overweight nurse glared at him.

"Donna," he read the nametag haphazardly pinned to her faded pink scrubs. "She needs help. She's barely breathing." He shifted Rachel's legs in his arms as though she weighed him down, though in truth he barely noticed the burden.

"And what is it that makes her emergency so much more important than all these others?" Donna asked. There was a dead weight in her eyes, like he could see in the soldiers he'd spent his life around. She wasn't going to give in out of sympathy. She didn't know Rachel like he did. Hadn't seen her light up the room with a smile or curl a finger around his heart with her innocent playfulness.

If they'd been alone, it would be easy to convince Donna of Rachel's importance. But there were too many witnesses.

"There's a silver locket around her neck. Consider it yours."

Donna picked up the telephone in front of her. "I need a gurney."

He could only distantly hear the complaints of the people around him as he circled the desk and armed security guards let him pass through the doors into a long, white hallway that smelled like Manticore. All sweat, blood and antiseptic.

Nurses in pink pulled a padded bed on wheels to a stop in front of him. The sheets were old, almost yellow from overuse and the idea of them touching Rachel's body was hideous to him. She was supposed to be in her fancy mansion, hidden from the ugliness of what the rest of the world had been dealing with since the pulse.

"Put her down," a nurse instructed. "Try not to move her neck if you can help it."

The others tried to help him as 494 slowly lowered Rachel's body to the padding. The moment he was clear, they shoved him aside, braced her neck and wheeled her down the hallway. He could easily fight them, but it would only distract their attention from Rachel.

"We need paperwork," Donna interrupted his thoughts, shoving a wooden clipboard into his chest until he grabbed it automatically.

"Incoming!" Nurses scattered around him, getting ready as double doors opened directly from outside and the group pulled a stretcher out of a dented red ambulance. There was widespread commotion, or what 494 interpreted to be organized panic. Also, as a hell of a lot more attention than Rachel had gotten. "Male, 34. Bullet wound to the back. Possible spinal cord injury."

He grabbed Donna's wrist before she could escape, yanking her to his side. "Who is that?" he nodded to the new patient, being prepped for surgery even as they moved him.

"Someone who can afford an ambulance." She tried to back away, but he dug his fingers into her skin and felt her pulse accelerate against his skin.

"There's _nothing_ we can't afford. Make sure she lives," he said, holding eye contact until he was sure she understood him. Then, he smiled and let go. "I'll just finish this paperwork."

With that, he walked slowly down the hallway, his heart thundering in his chest as he tried not to run into the Operating Room where they tried to save Rachel, or turn around and make it even more clear to Donna that her life and Rachel's were now inextricably entwined. But a lifetime of training held him together. He sat down on a plastic chair outside the O.R., put the clipboard in his lap and started reading.

The first problem and, coincidentally, also the first blank he was required to fill, was 'name.' Well, he couldn't very well write Rachel Berrisford, could he? Sandoval would be looking for him. If he was lucky, Manticore would initially assume that Rachel had died in the blast, but eventually, their forensics teams would put it together. In the meantime, she needed a new name. Hopefully she'd be better before they started looking because Seattle didn't have that many hospitals anymore. Well, they existed, sure, but they housed more squatters than medical personnel.

So he had to make up a name. The only thing in his head was _Donna_ which was definitely out. What would Rachel like? The names of various composers danced through his head, though he seriously doubted he could get away with calling her Beethoven without raising a few flags and eyebrows. _Lucy. _The first time they'd met, she'd played that goofy, fun song from a cartoon and forced him see her as a person. He wrote it down.

Lucy... Brown? Mozart? Lehane? Simon? Simmons?

He'd always been weirdly suspicious of common names on solo ops. Whenever he met an Agent Anderson, his automatic thought was _lazy alias_. John Smith? _Must be CIA_. What he needed was something weird. Hard to pronounce or too unbelievably awful to be made up. Like something that rhymed with genitalia. But he also didn't want it to stick in anyone's head.

So he wrote 'Fulk.' First sequence of letters that came to him.

He moved on. Social Security Number.

XXX

More difficult, 494 found out, than pushing his brain to work overtime coming up with possible solutions to trivial problems was letting it wander on its own. He knew that most of his fellow soldiers at Manticore had made it their life's goal to focus on nothing, to shut down every part of themselves that wasn't a soldier 24/7, but he'd never been able to do it. Put on a good show of it, perhaps, but his mind was always whirling with something. Generally, his thought process was consumed with what he would _like _to say.

Early in life, it became clear that no one was much interested in listening to him. On _very_ rare occasion he'd been able to suggest alternatives to any given game plan that wasn't met with some kind of negative consequence. But the temptation to try had been more or less beaten out of him over the years. It hadn't stopped him when Rachel's life was on the line, but it gave him the experience to know when he was fighting a losing battle.

The monumental fuck up he'd made that morning wasn't lost on him. He'd chosen to fight Manticore and the best case scenario he could see was a sniper shot to the head. Wouldn't see it coming. Of course, it only meant that instead of having his life flash before him when he died, it flashed before him every time someone new walked up the wide corridor toward the operating room. He'd wait for them to pull a gun, wondering if that second would be his last.

Re-capture wasn't an option. Even if he negotiated turning himself in, the best he could hope for was months of torture. He'd heard the stories, just like the rest of them, back when they were kids. Almost an entire unit had tried to escape. They'd been taken apart to find their malfunction. Psy-ops personnel said he was _lucky_ he wasn't part of that unit, even as they probed every disloyal thought he'd ever had, punishing him for all that and more. He couldn't have been more than eight years old, though the actual date of his birth was a mystery.

Even if he somehow managed to evade capture, they'd made it clear that it was impossible for a transgenic to survive outside. What made them superior, their strength, quickness and durability was their DNA, an unnatural balance that couldn't maintain itself without medicinal supplementation. Only Manticore had the meds, so only Manticore could keep him alive.

494 was going to die.

But he had to be sure, first, that Rachel wasn't.

"Mr. Fulk?"

The voice penetrated his perception, but it meant nothing to him. He blinked at the intruder, a weary woman in pink scrubs holding a clipboard.

"Your wife made it through surgery. We repaired the internal bleeding and dressed the burns but there's not much we can do about the head injury. She's lapsed into a coma."

The term wife, he'd come to understand only through his verbal classes at Manticore. Robert Berrisford's wife had died long before 494 posed as Simon Lehane, inserting himself into their lives as Rachel's piano teacher. So in theory, he was aware that a wife's role could range from shared responsibility and property consolidation to decorative trinket and event planner. Much like the surrogates at Manticore, they also provided a much needed home to future offspring, fulfilling an apparent biological imperative of the species. None of these things appealed to 494 in respect to his own relationship with Rachel. He had no property to share, business to consolidate or events to plan and procreation of any kind was forbidden by Manticore and dangerous enough to kill Rachel.

However, legally, a marriage in effect fused the decision making process between people, leaving the strongest of will to dominate the partnership. Medically speaking, it gave him the decision making power he needed to save Rachel's life.

"What about a neck injury? Paralysis?" The words came to him without conscious thought. It was a worry that plagued him. Almost worse than seeing Rachel gone would be to see her diminished, to never be able to move freely. Confined to a prison of her own body. It was a nightmare he'd only heard stories about at Manticore.

"We have her neck braced, but other than severe bruising and whiplash, it's not our main concern."

"She has brain function? She _could_ wake up?"

"It's possible, but..." The nurse kept talking, but 494 heard nothing else. He'd been forced all his life to embrace the very limits of his physical capability. Now he'd make Rachel do the same.

"Where is she?" he interrupted.

"We're preparing her for release."

"That's unacceptable." He couldn't take care of her himself. He didn't have a place to live, much less a medical degree. It would take him weeks or more to learn everything he needed to treat her condition, let alone make steps to heal her.

"You didn't list an insurance provider, unless you're able to pay out of pocket -"

"I am."

Dubiously, the nurse flicked her eyes over his attire. So it wasn't a fucking business suit, he'd been feet away from an explosion.

"Look, I don't care if you believe me. I care that you give my wife a hospital room."

"Sir, our policy is to receive payment up front."

"How much?"

She gave him a number, one that he wasn't sure how to come up with, but he'd find a way. Assassination was a marketable skill.

"If you give me until the end of the day tomorrow, I'll give you twice that."

Unlike Donna, this nurse looked offended. Oh well, he'd tried the easy way.

XXX

_Idiot_, Max Gueverra had repeated in her head over and over ever since she'd watched Logan Cale get shot in broad daylight on the news footage that afternoon. If you wanted to be a hero, you couldn't get your ass shot off. Granted, he'd tried to bring in the big guns, namely herself, to protect him, but just the fact that they'd been caught on camera by a hoverdrone proved she was right not to be there. _Idiot._

There was something admittedly attractive about someone wanting to save the world and all that, she could see why he'd want to take the country back before the pulse when he probably spent his summers on a yacht anchored off Sicily. Or maybe he liked everything as it was so he could run around bringing light to the masses. Suddenly, his life had a point and he wanted to guilt everyone else into his personal battle.

Max didn't mind the state of the world. Yeah, bad guys ruled the show, but how was that different than before? Some big corporation slamming on the little guy? At least gangsters were straight up about it. Plus, the whole decline in technology and infrastructure made it a whole lot easier for a girl to hide from the government agency that created her.

It was rare to meet a person defined by their ideals. She, herself, had very few, so there was something appealing about the idealist thing Logan had working for him. Provided she could get over the total violation of him going through her stuff uninvited. Or what he'd done next.

Perhaps the most annoying part of her genetic engineering was the fact that she rarely met people that weren't attracted to her. It made laying low difficult and created a lot of problems. But it was always a weapon at the ready, usable in any given situation.

But Logan had twisted it on her. She'd assumed his interest was in her as a woman and he'd catered to that assumption, albeit in creepy ways, leaving her gifts, cooking her dinner without bothering to actually invite her. He'd seemed like a normal guy, ignorant of those things that actually attracted a woman, but still just trying to play the dating game.

Just remembering the smug satisfaction on his face when he saw the barcode Manticore genetically engraved to her neck made Max's stomach drop to her toes as it had in that moment. _She'd_ been the idiot then. Off her guard, off her game. It had been so long since someone had seen her barcode, she'd almost forgotten they could.

Not that most of them would have understood it if they had. Apparently, she'd just happened to break into the apartment of the one person who did. She'd been too angry at herself to offer him alternatives to his suicide mission.

It was hardly her fault that his plan was tactically flawed and all around stupid. Unfortunately, she still felt bad that he'd nearly died, which was why she was sneaking down the hall of Harbor Lights hospital, looking for him. Most of the rooms were dark, but she could see just fine. Even so, a small table light illuminated Logan's face in the doorway of room 314. She could see the tubes running to his nose.

"You idiot!" she couldn't help erupting at the unconscious man as she walked through the door.

Of course, the second she actually walked through the door, Max really wished she'd kept her mouth shut.

Apparently, Logan had a roommate. A pretty brunette girl that couldn't have been older than eighteen was laying in a bed a few feet away from Logan's and was hardly in a position to care about Max's outburst.

But her boyfriend, an extremely good looking man in his early twenties, looked kind of pissed. "_What_?" He was staring at Max in confused surprise from his seat next to the girl's bed, where his thumb continued to massage her pale hand. His eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot. She could see the tears making his eyelashes clump together and his pupils dilated under the glow of the small light, piercing Max's heart with immediate empathy. He looked like he'd been through hell. And great, apparently she was yelling at him.

"Visiting hours are over," she said, the dumbest possible thing she could have mentioned, given her own presence.

"I'm sure you'll be the first person I tell when I care."

Smart ass. Max couldn't help being annoyed with herself for walking into it. Especially when she'd meant to go a much gentler direction. "Sorry. I wasn't expecting anyone else to be here."

"Yeah, I threatened a nurse to get Rachel a bed. Sorry if it styles your cramp."

"_Cramps_ your _style_?" Max tried.

Terror crossed his face momentarily, as though she'd caught him in a monumental lie, but he shrugged it off. "Yeah, that. I'm... tired."

"No shock there. She going to be okay?" Max asked, wandering over to the window to avoid the look in his eyes.

"Yes." But he didn't sound like he believed it, more like he wanted to.

Max lifted one of the venetian blinds, looked out over the cityscape ... and froze. "I need you to do exactly what I say." She turned to find him on his feet, alert and waiting. "Grab her IV and wheel her out of the room _now._ I'm right behind you."

He moved immediately, without question. It was both a shock and a relief. There was nothing worse than someone wanting explanations when there was no time for them, but in her experience that rarely stopped people from mouthing off with any stupid thing that occurred to them. He was out the door with the girl almost immediately, clearing the way for her to push Logan's bed out after him.

Five seconds later, the room exploded.

Light flashed brightly down the hallway, before the overheads crashed, covering them in darkness. Max felt her legs lift from the floor just before her back hit the wall and she found herself staring into wild eyes that reflected the orange light of the fire deep in their pupils. "What do you know?" he whispered.

Normally, she'd push him off her and kick his ass for the attempted threats and manhandling, but Max relaxed instead. Not like he was hurting her. "Logan was shot today. Guy outside tried to finish the job."

"Logan?"

"The one in the other bed? Doesn't talk much?"

"Right." Boyfriend nodded, relaxing, but not pulling away. The automatic sprinklers popped on, and cold water poured down over Max's face and hair, under the collar of her jacket. Her breath hissed as it trickled between her breasts and lower. If she had to cut back to her place and change before she schlepped to Logan's, her night was going to last forever.

In front of her, Boyfriend slumped, the water adding yet another level of discomfort onto his misery and despite the fact that he seemed fairly willing to choke her just a few moments ago, Max couldn't help feeling his pain.

"So whadja do?" she asked, unwilling to pretend she was stupid enough not to pick up on the obvious.

He winced and, if anything, she'd drawn his attention away from the fact that the ceilings were raining on his comatose sweetheart. "Nothing you need to worry about."

"We should probably keep walking," Max suggested as, despite the water, the fire continued to rage in earnest.

The poor guy looked like he was about to collapse from either despair, exhaustion or pure disorientation. Gently, Max pushed him toward his girlfriend's bed even as security ran toward the fire with buckets, yelling about the fire department.

"Take them to the lobby!" a nurse yelled at Max, holding an elevator door open for them to wheel in Rachel and Logan's beds.

XXX

494 was fucking up left and right and he was debating just killing the curly haired brunette to end the frustration. Not that she seemed like a particular threat, as she'd treated everything that happened with a serenity that made him jealous. And it wasn't all that likely she'd run to the police, given that _her_ boyfriend was getting blown up too.

"So what's your name?" she asked as the floors ticked down toward L.

Yet another thing to pull out of the air. "I don't know." He should of just made something up. Tom, how about that? Joe. Nice and generic. What was it about this girl that dragged him into all this uncomfortable honesty?

"I'm Max."

That, he was fairly sure, was largely considered to be a boy's name. But it fit her. Energy exuded from her smile and he couldn't help hating her a little bit just for being alive. "Hi, Max. Nice weather, huh?"

"You know if you don't tell me, I'll just make one up for you."

"_Could you_?" He asked sarcastically, but it didn't stop him from hoping she would. It would be really nice to have someone else making up bull shit personal information for a few minutes.

The elevator dinged and they pushed their respective coma patients into the lobby. "Well, this is my stop, but it was great to meetcha... Alec."

She punched his arm, getting some serious muscle behind it. He watched her depart, hips swinging as he let the name wash over him.

Alec. A common nickname for 'Alexander.' But he'd heard it in other contexts. In Manticore, during his classes on common verbal usage, the teacher had called him a _smart aleck_. When he'd found out what it meant, he'd been pleased. He'd also been cleared to the next level of speech preparatory classes.

"What do you think, Rachel?" he asked softly. "Am I an 'Alec'?"

XXX

It _was_ a long night for Max. Also rewarding in that superhero, help others sort of way. She tried not to think too much about how close she was to being caught. How inches had separated the space between herself and Col. Donald Lydecker, the man who wanted her brought back to Manticore, either kicking and screaming or broken and cold. It probably didn't matter to him which. After he'd shot Eva, another child in her unit, Max had stopped believing he was in it for their best interests.

That was the night they escaped. She hadn't stopped running until she landed in Seattle.

Despite the close call, she _wasn't_ caught and _didn't_ have to go back to the cold, cement military compound that mixed her up a unique genetic cocktail of different cats, animals and who-the-hell-knows. So she was on a high. Spent a few hours zipping around the city on her Ninja 650 before finding herself pulling up in front of Harbor Lights for the second time in twelve hours.

She wouldn't mind telling Logan she'd singlehandedly worked his miracle for him while he was out, but of course, he'd probably _still_ be out by the time she got there. Really, the only person she'd be able to talk to was Alec, and he hadn't seemed particularly thrilled by her presence.

People so rarely recognized what was good for them. He was a wreck. Probably hadn't even eaten yet.

With that in mind, Max hid her bike in an alleyway and approached the nearest food stand. She'd heard of a time when you could pull up to McDonald's any time before ten am and get anything you could imagine. Eggs, bacon, toast, pancakes and hashbrowns. Any of that pore clogging beauty. That wasn't the case in post-pulse Seattle. So, she got what they had. An energy bar, bacon jerky, few rice cakes and coffee. It was still _Seattle_. There was an unending supply of coffee, it just wasn't particularly great anymore.

She doubted Alec would appreciate her efforts in respect to taste, but maybe he could hold Rachel's hand for a few more hours without fainting.

It wasn't until she was almost up the steps to Harbor Lights when it caught her eye.

Hidden just outside the view of most people, parked on a sidestreet, was a black Mercedes SUV in absolutely mint condition. 2018 model at the oldest. No head in the window. No guard.

Alec would have to wait.

XXX

He didn't want to be _too_ obvious. It wasn't like he could just park in the marketplace. There were plenty of people that would _want_ the fine piece of machinery he'd lifted from Manticore. But he couldn't let just anyone steal it. He needed someone with connections, who knew where to go to fence it and wouldn't mind letting him take the lion's share of the profit off their hands.

When he made it clear what the alternatives were, Alec was pretty sure that would be the easy part.

So he'd hidden in plain view, hoping it would take a somewhat experienced thief to notice and take advantage.

But it had been _hours _and he was sweating from the stale heat and nervousness as his stomach growled at him in annoyance. One thing Manticore had been good at was regular feeding. They had to keep their soldiers in top condition, so they each had perfectly nutritious meals catered to their specific genetic traits. Even on missions, they stocked his cupboards with MREs and eating instructions. When he'd been with Rachel, food seemed unimportant, but as he lay on the floor, staring up at the ceiling of an SUV, it was all he could think about.

He was so involved with the pain in his stomach, the sound of the locking mechanism turning in the driver's door took him by surprise. _Finally._ The fact that he hadn't heard them approach was a positive sign, though. They were _good_. Good thieves knew people.

The door opened and Alec could hear the slosh of liquid as something thunked none too gently into the cup holder. Coffee, he realized, as the smell hit him. Before he'd gone on the Berrisford mission, he'd never tasted coffee. Or beer, for that matter. At the present moment, he could have gone for either... or both.

Plastic bags bounced one by one on the passenger seat before the thief settled into the driver's seat and Alec noticed dark curls flowing over edge of the seat, past the head rest. A woman, he realized, before his mind narrowed further. Not just _any_ woman.

He sat up to confirm the theory just as she leaned forward, popping the casing below the ignition.

"Don't bother, I have a key."

Max spun, drilling Alec's neck to the arm rest behind him. Just as quickly, she released him. "God, Alec, you scared the shit out of me."

"Good morning to you too."

"What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you, Maxie." He tossed her the keys. "I figure I provide the ride, you take it to your fence or whatever you kids are calling it these days, we come up with an equitable split for both parties, whattayasay?" He'd practiced just that word slur in front of a mirror until he got it right to pass a common verbal usage test at Manticore. The obnoxious salesman grin he threw her way was just for fun.

"50-50," Max negotiated.

"70-30, it's my car."

"You gave me the keys," she pointed out.

"Because I knew you couldn't resist. 60-40."

"What is this, charity? I give you a connection for the future, you take away my business? No deal."

Alec smarted over _charity_ though he supposed that would be exactly what it would be if she agreed to the deal just because she felt bad for his situation. He appreciated that she was hard lining the negotiation, it put him at ease. "50-50," he agreed. Though he figured once the money was actually in front of them, there was strong potential for renegotiation.

He climbed into the passenger seat, clearing her rubble when he noticed what it was. _Food._ "Hey, are you going to eat this?"

Max turned the key in the ignition and shrugged. "Go for it."

XXX

It was gratifying to watch Alec tear through the food she'd bought with him in mind without actually having to _admit_ she'd done so.

"Coffee?" she offered, looking into the rearview as she backed onto the main street.

Slurping was her only answer and Max struggled to keep her smile to herself. "This thing have bullet proof siding?"

"Doesn't everything?" Alec asked between bites.

"Only stateside. This one's a Euromake."

"It's got it."

Car wasn't worth it's weight in Seattle without good siding. Most people tore apart their old car doors and stuffed it with paper, blankets, whatever would fit that had a chance of working. Not perfect, but more or less effective. This one hadn't been ripped apart and re-worked like a quilt, so it either had it or it didn't. Had to be worth some serious dough. Though Max and Alec would probably only see a fraction of it.

"Rachel get a new room?" Max asked, though even as the words left her lips, she wanted to swallow her tongue.

Alec wilted. His enthusiastic crunching quieted and he swallowed, just staring at what remained of his bacon jerky. "Yeah, stuffed her in some other room with a cancer patient and amputee. Not sure what happened to Logan."

"I'm sure he's got the penthouse view," Max shrugged it off. Logan had more money than God, as far as Max had observed. She was sure he'd get the royal treatment.

"Heard a doctor say he might not walk again." Alec was shifting the focus of the conversation and not very subtly, but Max let it go.

"Doubt that keeps him out of trouble."

"As long as no one tries to blow up the hospital."

"Oh, I took care of that last night. Next fire bomber will be a character in _your_ little drama."

Most people Max knew would take the opening in the conversation to bitch about whatever was going on in their lives. Alec wasn't most people, though. "So what are you, his girlfriend? His bodyguard?" he asked instead.

"Robbed his place couple days back. Not sure where that puts us on a relationship front."

"Where'd you say he lived again?" Alec asked.

"You just gonna keep moving in on my cash flow? Case a score yourself, lazy ass."

She would have sworn he smiled, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. "So, who are we meeting?" he asked.

"A fence."

"He have a name?"

"Statistically likely."

"Well, this is great intel, Max. Nice to know what we're driving into."

"God, you sound just like my brother."

XXX

Alec wasn't sure what to say. What _could_ he say about this brother he didn't know or a familial construct he didn't really understand? Like wives, he knew what brothers were, but he'd never had one. Neither did Rachel, she was an only child. She once told him she'd often wished for a little brother or sister for Christmas, but Santa hadn't given in to her demands and apparently it had something to do with her making the Baby Jesus cry. He'd bailed on the conversation rapidly. Rachel never wanted to talk about anything easy, like tactics or gene-splicing. It was all pop culture mythology. She'd once pulled him out of a discussion on genetics to go swimming, literally leaving him to tread water.

Of course, that had been the best night of his entire life.

"Alec?" He left his reverie as Max turned the car abruptly, driving them into a large garage Alec could only assume was a chop shop. This was it. As she came to a stop and threw the car in park, Max's eyes ran over him, though what she was looking for wasn't clear. "Just don't... talk, okay?"

With that, she gave him a big smile and exited the vehicle.

Obviously, Alec had done a crap job of impressing upon her the fact that he was actually a dangerous criminal. Or, he had the potential to be. Once he got the money, he really ought to rectify that problem.

As he stuffed the rest of his breakfast down his throat and stepped out of the car, he noticed a rotund, middle aged black man approaching Max. In other contexts, Alec was sure that the man could probably look threatening as hell, but there was a giddiness in his expression that had nothing to do with the car in his garage. "Hey, sugar, what do you have for me?"

"Only the best, Jimmy. Practically off the assembly."

It was then that Jimmy noticed Alec and his expression soured. "You know this ain't no red district, baby doll."

"He's not what I'm selling."

The fence refocused on the Mercedes, but Alec had the disturbing feeling that Max had just saved him from something horrible.

"You're breaking my heart, Maxie, bringing your toys 'round here," Jimmy said as he circled the car.

"Who, Alec? Professional courtesy, seeing as he introduced me to this fine lady." Max ran a loving hand over the hood of the SUV.

It was a challenge to follow their conversation and most of what he did interpret was from body language. Jimmy had a more than businesslike appreciation for Max, saw Alec as a threat and Max played along with it, undoubtedly to get a better price on the car.

"3 G."

G was grand. It was a relief to finally understand the flow of conversation but also insulting. "Are you kidding? She blue books 50, minimum."

Jimmy turned to Max in amusement. "You get this one off the boat? Simple economics, kid. Can't pay out more than you can bring in. This is a prime model, for sure. Someone out there will be looking for it. I cut it down, I lose value. Deal here or take it elsewhere."

"Alec," Max said carefully, glaring at him. "Shut up."

He ignored her. "I ripped out the GPS, filed the VIN."

"So it's _damaged_, then?" Jimmy smiled. "3 G. Only offer."

Whoops.

XXX

Somehow, she had expected Alec to listen to her. Possibly because he'd done it so well the night before, but apparently he _was_ new to the game and felt the need to make everyone else suffer for it.

"You're killing me, Jimmy," Max told him, knowing it would in no way affect his price. That's what she liked about him, she didn't have to beat him into a better offer. Or, she hadn't had to do it more than once.

"You could supplement that income, I suppose." Jimmy gave her a toothy, suggestive grin.

"I thought I told you he's not for sale."

"How you wound me." Hand to heart, Jimmy winced. "No. I know of a two-man job. You trust this one?" He nodded toward Alec. "It's an easy fifty large."

Suddenly, Alec's newness to the game and mysterious situation seemed meaningless as Max considered all the beautiful things she could add to her motorcycle. She could definitely trust him. He was caring for his sick girlfriend... and had no name. "Oh, you know, he's just getting back into the swing of things, but we go way back, me and Alec."

"Practically grew up together," Alec agreed.

"He'll be fine," Max insisted.

Or she'd just kick his ass until he was.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Dark Angel belongs to Cameron/Eglee and 20th Century Fox. No infringement intended, though much fun had.

Author's Note: Thank you guys for the wonderful response!

**Carnal Knowledge**

_by scarlet (superscar)_

Chapter Two

_Seattle, Washington - 2019_

There was an obvious downside to selling your only mode of transportation, Alec discovered as he walked back to Harbor Lights. But he had a job, sort of. A 'gig', you might say. If you were a guitarist or an actor. A plan was probably the best way to characterize it as a thief. It didn't sound too bad. Luckily, the advantage of a 'two-man' job was it involved two. Separate, as in, he would go in one entrance, Max would go in another. She wouldn't have to see him cheat his genetically enhanced ass off.

In the meantime, Rachel had a bed for the next couple nights and Alec reserved the chair next to it.

The city was just waking up, for the most part. The vendors had been around for hours, but the lines had only just started to pile up in front of their booths. Apartment buildings lined the streets, but they were all in disrepair. Most had signs warning the building was condemned, but squatters poured out the doors regardless. He couldn't help wondering if it would be hard to find a place. They wouldn't be able to advertise for apartments people weren't technically allowed to live in. At least not in any traditional way. Of course, he could probably just sleep under an awning and beat the shit out of anyone that came near him, but it didn't sound like a path to a quality REM cycle and eventually, he'd need a few.

All he really wanted to do was crawl into bed next to Rachel and pretend everything would be fine, so he could close his eyes and turn back the clock.

Alec stopped walking, alert. Even lost in thought, he'd been trained to notice if he was under surveillance. He took a sharp right, hopped into an alleyway and heard a muttered curse and hurried footsteps. It wasn't subtle enough for Manticore, but that only raised more questions. Who would follow him? Who even knew he was there? Max? Jimmy? If they were regretting the price they'd negotiated, they'd only learn the hard way.

His surveillance rounded the corner and he pounced, clamping his hand around their neck and listening to the breath whoosh from their lungs. It was a woman, as it turned out. She had very red hair, deeper than fire and ill fitting clothing, far too tight for full movement. Alec couldn't help but notice the path of her neckline, lower than any he'd ever seen, outlining breasts that practically popped from her shirt.

She started choking and he let her go as she doubled over.

"Why are you following me?"

"Just...thought you were cute," she gasped.

Cute. Rachel had said that too. What confused him was the understatement. 'Cute' was a description he was given to understand had a soft connotation. Young animals were cute. Pigtails on little girls were cute. Alec was a fucking soldier. If women wanted to compliment his physical characteristics they should use proper vocabulary. He wasn't cute, he was perfect. Superior.

"Puppies are cute," Alec said, glaring.

"Fine, baby, you're sex on legs. You wanna go or what? Fifty bucks for the extra kink. Just let go before I pass out, aiight?"

He wanted, very badly, to ask what she was talking about, but he didn't understand the combination of words out of her mouth. Sex was an animal mating ritual that resulted in offspring between ordinaries and forbidden at Manticore. He supposed, from her language, that she wanted to engage in that sort of activity while standing up, but that would kill her. Obviously, she didn't know that or she wouldn't make an invitation, but he thought she was unwise to engage in such mating rituals with a stranger and even as he considered it, Alec realized what she was. A prostitute. He'd learned about them strictly in respect to language. Whore and slut were common slang terms meant to suggest that someone either _was_ a prostitute or acting like one, but it got confusing because sometimes it meant they were just not particularly well liked.

Ironic, as he'd assumed prostitutes would be _very _well liked.

He found the concept of sex fascinating and was extremely jealous that ordinaries could fuck any time they wanted to without fear of danger. It was possible, of course, that he could take the prostitute up on her offer and let her die, but without strategic advantage, Alec just couldn't feel comfortable killing someone out of what could be termed biological curiosity. This was aside from the practical concern of hiding the body, which would only take up time better spent with Rachel.

"No, thanks." Alec tried to get around the woman, but her hand slipped down the front of the cargo pants he'd snagged from a locker at the hospital. Breath hissing from between his teeth, Alec's hand clamped around her wrist, unsure whether to push her off him or rub against her as all the blood in his body seemed to focus in that area.

"Don't feel too sure about that, champ," she whispered. "Twenty bucks, let Candy take all that pain away."

She'd said fifty before, so clearly the price was negotiable. But Alec didn't want Candy to take his pain away, he wanted to go back to the hospital, pay off the nurse and lay his head down next to Rachel's arm and not have to think about anything until Max showed up.

_Max_ was the wrong person to think of with a hooker's hand down his pants.

"Maybe some other time," he said firmly, retracting her claws from his person.

"Look, I'm clean, if that's what you're worried about," she insisted.

Alec wasn't even sure what she was _talking_ about.

"Five bucks for a hand job," Candy begged. "Final offer and I'll let you be on your way. Promise I'll be quick... or not! If you want it to go longer."

"I don't have that kind of cash," Alec pushed past her quickly, but couldn't help wondering... What was a hand job?

XXX

In the decade that Max had been out of Manticore, she'd mostly bounced around the Pacific Northwest, keeping mostly to populated areas. It seemed counter-intuitive if someone was after you. Might be a better idea to keep to high ground with an eye to the road out in the middle of no where, but it made a person crazy. Two weeks, she'd lived in a box in the middle of Montana, overlooking a statuesque wilderness that scared the shit out of her.

Every time something moved, she was terrified.

It was hard to be anonymous if there were only five people in two hundred miles. Everyone was so excited just to see another soul, they'd ask question after question until Max had no idea how she could possibly make up another story about her life before the pulse.

The first time she'd set foot in Seattle was after she'd ruined things pretty spectacularly in Los Angeles with an incident she really didn't want to think about involving a genetically enhanced case of extreme arousal and a guy that didn't understand why she would turn her 'God, yes' into a 'hell, no.'

After about a year and a half, Lydecker's presence in the area was probably a hint to move it on up the coast and finally hop the border, but Max liked Seattle. She could give it a few more months if she kept her head down. Deck would assume she'd moved on to another city and maybe he would follow suit.

"Crash later?"

Max smiled as her best friend spun the combination on her locker. All of her life, it had been an advantage to be able to read people and predict situations. With Cindy, Max never knew what she would say or how she'd manage to say it, only that when she talked about herself, it was almost always in the third person. "Might put in an appearance."

"Or might skip out like last night?" Cindy asked. "Not that Original Cindy blames you with the ex sniffing around like you might forget the story."

Darren. Mistake to start, mistake to continue, relief to end. "I forget who you mean."

"For real, you should."

"Already done." She wanted to drop the subject and forget about the mess that was her romantic life, but it was just too much. "What is _wrong_ with men?"

Cindy's eyebrows rose. "Since you remember who you're talking to, that has to be a rhetorical question?"

"Whatever, I'm done with them." Until her wacked out biological clock put her back in the ball game, of course. Which would probably be soon. Then, she would either spend three days out of her mind with lust or worse, find herself dealing with the awkward morning after. Maybe if any of that pain _replaced_ the monthly menstrual cycle that plagued every other woman on the planet, but it didn't. Every 19 to 37 days like the rest of her irregular life.

"If you're ready to switch teams, let me just say... It's about time." Cindy had never really understood why any 'fine-ass female' _wouldn't_ want to be a lesbian.

"Sorry, OC, not off the team, just on the bench."

"Is the package I gave you going to bike itself to Sector Five?"

As Max's boss poked his head unpleasantly into the conversation, she was suddenly inspired. "I'll take that."

It was hard to say who was more shocked, Reagan "Normal" Ronald or Cindy, but Sector Five was perfect. She could deliver the package, swing by Harbor Lights and still hit Crash before the job that night.

XXX

Harbor Lights was crowded during the day. Alec appreciated the anonymity of it, but not the lack of privacy. The bathrooms open to the public were dirty from overuse and lack of funding. Most of the cleaning staff dedicated its time to the sterile areas, where bacteria could literally be a matter of life and death. The toilet bowls had long since lost even the dingey appearance of white and even the strong scent of urinal cakes couldn't overwhelm the rest of the foul odors.

Even in their sorry state, Harbor Lights easily beat the public bathroom facilities on the street so many had turned to after the pulse.

But Alec was spoiled. He hadn't been forced to live in the degradation of post-pulse Seattle. Manticore had set him up with a cozy little apartment in Sector Nine where he easily commuted to the Berrisford's blue blood mansion. Manticore itself was as sterile as they were able to make it. All it took was one trip to the bathroom and Alec wanted to vomit. From the smell of things, he wouldn't have been the first.

After that, he started sneaking into the doctor's bathroom. The door was barred with a combination padlock, which was less a barrier than an invitation and it was easy to keep track of the few doctors on the wing.

He'd helped himself to some of their clothes. It wasn't like they didn't have more where those came from. If Rachel was under any more than a week, he'd actually have to go get his own wardrobe, which was a hassle because where would he put it? That's what ordinaries had houses for. At Manticore, there was a basket just inside the door to the barracks that contained every item of clothing they would need for the day. Generally, that was standard issue camo pants, combat boots, a t-shirt, white athletic socks and boxer briefs. It was always interesting to see what happened on the first day of a solo operation. Whoever was in charge of the wardrobe during away missions was a lot more creative. Detail was everything. From unique clothing and jewelry to hair and nail polish. Everything had to look perfect. That was a big theme for Manticore.

Weakness was shame. Emotions were a problem to be fixed with psychoactive drugs and negative stimuli.

Even lying to Rachel had been such a relief. The one time she caught him, it had been ridiculously easy to explain himself. Every step of his training made the infiltration of the Berrisford household simple. But nothing could have prepared him for Rachel. What could have, except a normal childhood? Even then, he couldn't imagine she wouldn't have bowled him over anyway. He'd pretend to be Simon when he was with her. Sometimes he would swear that he had been, that she'd made him let go of himself.

But at the same time, he was more physically aware. There was no real way to keep track of time in Manticore. He wasn't sure how old he was, or about how old he had been when the change occurred, but it coincided with a sudden appearance of body hair that had frightened him terribly. Surely only the basement people had to worry about such things? He hadn't told anyone. In fact, he had pulled as many as could be reached, but it was difficult. They had physical exams so often that it had been impossible to hide. But to his great relief, no one commented. Perhaps it was a natural byproduct of his feline DNA and there was nothing to be done about it.

At the time, he hadn't even considered that everyone else might have the same problem. Nor did he consider that they might be dealing with other common issues, such as the way his body suddenly began to betray him. The brass did a great job of keeping the soldiers on guard. They didn't socialize, just fought. All were paranoid that another transgenic might betray their confidence and it would cost them a month in psy-ops. Alec hadn't realized until years and years after the nightmare of his first nocturnal ejaculation that it might be related to normal, _human_ physiology and may not have resulted in a trip to solitary unless they wanted the entire male population of Manticore stuffed in there as well.

By the time he'd met Rachel, Alec understood the evolutionary purpose of his discomfort, but her presence only made it three hundred times worse. By the end of their time together, she'd been more than aware of the pain she was putting him through and he could swear she was doing it purposefully. She'd wanted to go further than their heated kisses, even though she didn't have much more experience than Alec himself. He couldn't come up with a good excuse not to. There wasn't one, other than the truth, which he couldn't tell her. So he'd just said that he wanted to, but didn't think it was the right time yet. Not a lie. He really, really wanted to, but it could never be the right time.

Of course, it just made her think he was all the more romantic and deserving of her virginity.

It was only the knowledge that his passion would literally kill her that kept him from giving in. Manticore had warned of the risks in terms of practicality, they didn't want their soldiers leaving behind more bodies than necessary, especially when it might be traced back to them. For Alec, it was sheerly personal. He didn't want to hurt Rachel. Unlike every other person in his life, for her, he felt something soft, like the blankets the Berrisfords kept on the large, leather couch in front of the television. It used to be his favorite place in the whole house, when Rachel was there with him.

He'd learned to control his body's unwelcome preparation for a mating process that could never take place. He regulated the overreaction to her stimuli by stepping into the bathroom to employ a trick he'd learned through sheer experimentation in his bunk at Manticore as a youngster. The technique had been perfected to an efficient science over the years and really, Rachel's presence only made it quicker and easier to dash in and out of the washroom without anyone the wiser.

It wasn't the same without her, of course. The physical reaction from the prostitute was unwelcome in light of what happened to Rachel. He wished his body could just shut off completely from everything but the ability to sit by her side at every moment until she woke up. But in spite of his feelings, he had to eat. He had to get money. Would only deal with further discomfort if he didn't take care of the problem immediately when he stepped into the bathroom stall.

What other time would he have if it persisted? It would severely hinder the operation with Max later on in the day and in Alec's experience, the longer the temptation persisted, the stronger the need became and it wasn't what he wished to dwell on all afternoon with Rachel.

Ironic to think that just 48 hours earlier, thoughts of her would be enough to heat his body into rapid release, but every time her face danced in his head, his stomach turned and ardor cooled. The vague arousal that persisted made his skin crawl in frustration even as nausea clamored for attention. He could feel every inch of his body pounding with blood, as though he'd been lit on fire in the worst possible way as the opposing chill fought for dominance.

Forcefully, he tried to push Rachel from his head and focus on the prostitute in the alleyway. She'd wanted to give him a hand job. Was that what he was trying to do to himself at that very moment? Was that why it had been given the name? What would it feel like if it was her hand wrapped around him? Would it be more exciting? More relaxing? More frustrating because she wasn't in his head and wouldn't know how to do it right? Surely prostitutes knew what they were doing.

Another image danced in his head and he clung to it, desperately. Sultry brown eyes winked at him through long dark lashes, playing out scenes from the television set. Full lips parted slowly, her dark curls bounced as she tossed her head. _Miss me, Alec?_ the imaginary woman asked as, finally, his body rocked with the familiar explosion, letting go of the torment.

Breathing hard, Alec leaned against the wall, still shaking. It was over. Slowly, he pulled himself back together, washed his hands, slipped into a new set of clothing from locker 24 and jogged back down the hallway.

When he got to Rachel's room, he found the other beds once again empty, though whether the other patients simply couldn't afford it or had been switched to another room, he would never know.

She was still out. It was too soon after the accident to even hope she would wake up yet.

Alec slid into the chair by her bed and placed her hand inside his where it belonged and leaned his forehead against the bed, with her arm brushing his head. Exhaustion overcame him as he slipped into his first sleep since the bomb.

XXX

Max just wheeled the bicycle with her down the halls of Harbor Lights. She had no idea where they'd stashed Rachel and she didn't know her last name, so she couldn't ask. Plus, everyone tended to mind their own business until they were approached with questions. It was a good way to make people curious without actually getting any answers.

She passed by Logan's door almost immediately. He was still out of it, but Max waved at him for the hell of it. But he wasn't Rachel's roommate anymore, he had the place to himself. All that old money working for him.

Rachel was in a little room in the corner of the building and she, too, was alone, except for the man curled over on his chair, his head resting against her side.

It didn't look comfortable and Max couldn't help wincing as she thought how tired Alec would have to be to fall asleep in that position. She would have found it impossible, but she hardly ever slept in the first place. The strangest thing about his position was actually his legs, the way his weight was on the balls of his feet even in sleep, as though he might need to spring from his seat without warning.

What the hell had happened to them?

Half of her wanted to move him to one of the empty beds. His neck would hurt like hell when he woke up if he stayed where he was. But if she woke him, there was no guarantee he could get back to sleep and he'd be wrecked for their little adventure that night. Maybe he needed to be close to Rachel, to assure himself that she was still there with him, at least physically speaking.

The girl looked awful. Worse than Logan and that was saying something. It was terrifying to think what might happen to Alec if she didn't recover. She seemed like his entire world.

Max sat on one of the other bunks in the room and lay back, looking up at the tiles. She hated it when people watched her sleep. Two very loosely termed boyfriends had had that unpleasant habit and she'd woken immediately, already on the lookout for a threat. Sure, it was unlikely Alec had the same instincts and training, but she wasn't about to do anything to distract from what precious sleep he could get.

XXX

Manticore's wake up buzzer was loud, unpleasant and impossible to sleep through. He'd been hearing it since before he could remember and Alec had an excellent memory. Even on the Berrisford mission, he awakened the same way he had every other day of his life, with a sudden lurch and pounding heart, ready for anything. The hospital hadn't changed anything. One second he was asleep, the next, awake and on his feet, taking in his surroundings as his memories flew back to him.

Rachel was on the bed in the same position he left her and the heart monitor flashed silently. The slight rise and fall of her chest were her only movements.

"Oh, good, you're up."

Alec spun immediately toward the new voice and it wasn't until he realized who she was that he started to breathe again. "Max. God, how did you get by me?"

"Uhh, you were unconscious?" As always, she didn't find him in the least bit threatening and lounged on the other bed almost lazily, one finger resting with the bicycle that leaned propped up against the mattress. She'd changed clothes and could have been anyone wandering the streets in a backwards baseball cap, pants that cut off just past the knees and old Nike sneakers.

"No. Yeah. Of course, I was asleep. Sorry." Alec could kill himself for half the shit he said to Max. Of course she wouldn't know that he was trained to be alert, even in REM sleep. She couldn't possibly be aware that it was usually impossible for him to sleep with another person in the room and it had only happened a few times, with other Manticore soldiers. Either his subconscious had decided she wasn't a threat, or Max was the most dangerous person he had ever met. But she didn't _seem_ like a threat, she seemed safe, which only made him all the more paranoid she was actually a threat. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

"In the neighborhood, thought we'd go over everything now, save time later."

The burglary. Of course. "Do you always take a bike to your strategy sessions?"

"Well, I can't just leave it on the street. There's thieves out there."

A joke, he recognized. Because they were thieves themselves, planning a burglary. He tried to smile, to respond in what would be considered a normal human way. It failed miserably.

Max frowned and sat up slowly, the smile on her face melting as she watched him intently. Great. He'd fucked up. Again. "We don't have to do this now. You can sleep. I'm sorry," she said, hopping off the bed and wheeling her bike from the room.

He realized his reaction hadn't come off as weird, but perfectly natural, given the circumstances. Soon after the relief, though, was panic. It hadn't seemed fake because it wasn't. She saw his true emotions and was trying to be considerate of them. He really needed to start _lying_ to this girl.

"I'm fine, Max. Let's just get this over with."

She didn't seem to buy it, but at least she went for it anyway, plastering a smile on her face as she pulled a chair up next to him. "Great!" she said and proceeded to actually pull the plans for the storage facility out of her shirt.

It was one of the most amazing things he'd ever seen in real life.

XXX

Max couldn't get Alec, or the mystery that was Alec, out of her head as she climbed up the stairs to her apartment for a pit stop. Obviously, he needed money. Someone was after him. He had no where to stay except his girlfriend's bedside and that girlfriend, Rachel's chart read _Lucy Fulk. _

Part of her couldn't help but judge him for his sloppiness in letting what Max assumed to be Rachel's real name slip, but the larger part of her understood what it was like, how difficult it was to lie about every little thing and why, when she'd met Cindy, she'd opened her mouth to give her a fake name, but "Max" popped out. Sometimes, it was just too exhausting to deal with. Even for someone like her.

"Honey, I'm home!" Max called as she walked through the door.

"Hey, Max," her friend Kendra walked through the beads she'd hung up on her doorway to give their apartment even more of a hippie look than it already had. "Chili on the stove. Well, really, more of a chunky tomato soup, but I choose to be glass half full. Or stomach half full, in this case."

"Sounds great. Was gonna meet up with the gang at Crash later, you in?"

Kendra knew the Jam Pony crew by association, but had so far avoided the pain and misery of actually working there with her excellent people skills. Mostly with men. She was convinced that knowing the right people was key to success in any walk of life, even, or especially, when the world is destroyed by an electromagnetic pulse. So far, she'd been proven correct.

"Sorry, got a friend in town," Kendra brushed off the invite.

"And by friend you mean...?"

"More than a friend. And by 'in town' I mean avoid the apartment or be forever scarred."

"Well, obviously I'll need the story when I get back." Max went back to the bedroom she rarely slept in, but housed all her belongings, and threw her black catsuit into a backpack next to her lock pick set and slim jim. Alec had assured her that he had everything he'd need as far as equipment went, though she suspected that they would probably be used for the first time that night. What kind of criminal didn't know how to argue a price with a fence? That he was out of his element was obvious, but why? If she didn't know better, she'd think he was an undercover cop. But, quite frankly, he wasn't a good enough liar. Plus, what about Rachel? She wasn't faking her coma.

He talked a good game and Max had no doubt he had broken in and out of many facilities by the time they were done planning, but it seemed like his knowledge and his experience were two different things, like he'd read a book about crime and was now trying to put it into practice.

It was a huge risk, bringing him with her, but it seemed too important not to do it.

XXX

"What's her angle, Rachel?" Alec asked, trying to get a handle on Max for not the first time that day.

Rachel ignored the question, of course, and even though he knew her expression hadn't changed in the least, it seemed more exasperated somehow, like she knew perfectly well what Max's deal was and he shouldn't be bothering her with these trifles _again_. It had to be his mind playing tricks on him, but he still stopped asking out loud.

The real issue ultimately boiled down to the fact that Max was way too nice. Which was weird, since she came off as kind of a bitch. Even in his imagination, she had an attitude. He could tell she felt sorry for him and it made him want to dangle her out the window and make her _scared_ of him for two seconds, damn it. Unfortunately, she would probably just glance casually from the ground back to his face and ask him if he really had time for all the drama.

It would be a decent question.

He had the strange feeling that she might think of him as a child or a puppy, or something equally cute, ineffectual and in need of constant care. Quite honestly, he really could use all the help he could get, so why did it bug him so much?

"We can handle this on our own, right?" he asked.

Nothing. It was beginning to seem like Rachel was on Max's side.

XXX

Crash pumped with music as Max walked through the doors. The first thing she saw was Calvin "Sketchy" Theodore balancing on the front wheel of his bike. It was pretty impressive until he swung his head to check out a girl's ass and wiped out.

"If you just kept your eyes in your head you'd be able to stay up, fool." Cindy emphasized this with a half loving, half annoyed smack to Sketchy's fake leather jacket.

"Isn't that how you hit the floor yesterday?" Max asked as she walked up.

"Max! Welcome." Sketch grabbed a glass from the table and poured a beer from the pitcher. "Beer?"

"Always."

She was just sliding into her seat when her pager lit up. Since most of her friends were already at the bar, it had to be a business call, probably about the job that night. Jimmy, probably. Alec didn't have her pager number. Though, in hindsight, she should have given it to him.

It may have been surprising to anyone else, but at first she didn't recognize the number because it was 14 digits, like any telephone number, but began with two zeroes, so it couldn't be.

00332960073452

Max's stomach tightened and the hair stood up on the back of her neck, right where the other twelve digits of that very number were genetically attached to her skin in the form of a barcode. Quickly, and, she hoped, subtly, Max threw a glance around the room, trying to detect anything out of the ordinary. Neither of the pay phones in either corner of the bar were being used and the phone under the bar was being passed back and forth between two giggling girls that couldn't possibly be old enough to drink legally. Not that anyone cared. Max probably wasn't old enough herself.

"Boo?" Cindy tried to get Max's attention, but she was already at the bar, ready to rip the phone right out of the teenagers hands when she heard the laughter on the other end. Another girl around the same age. Most likely had nothing to do with the situation, just some kids that couldn't afford a cell.

"Could you hurry it up?" she bitched at them. Not like they were the only broke ass females in the city.

Belligerently, they continued talking, until Max's glare started to get scary and they quickly said their good byes and hung up. Right on cue, another phone number popped up on her pager. Not one she recognized but she'd hardly been expecting to. She made sure to throw in the blocking code before dialing the number from her pager.

She heard the click of a receiver. A land line, she noted, not a cell. "Hello, 452." A male voice.

"Is that supposed to be, like, my area code? I live in Seattle." It was worth a shot, though she wasn't putting any money on it. Maybe it would at least get him talking and she'd recognize his voice.

"Nice try, Max."

So he had her name and both her numbers. Who _was_ he? "You wanted to talk to me, start."

"I'm blackmailing you. I have information about you that I could give to Colonel Lydecker, but if I have 30 large by, say, 4 am, I won't. Good deal, right?"

"Can't pull that kind of money that fast."

"Sure you can. You have super powers. Plus, if you don't or you decide to just jump ship, I'll just tell him about your friends instead. Like Logan Cale, for example. Really doubt he's in the right kind of shape to be moved anyway, plus it would be so much hassle. You'd be better off paying me."

"Or, you can tell Colonel Mustard whatever you want about whoever, cause your information is wrong."

"No, it's not. Call me when you have it." She heard the click of the receiver. Great.

XXX

It was almost possible to enjoy the tranquil boredom of waiting for Max in the alley across the street from their target, a five story black building that reflected all the light in the city. The problem, of course, was that he hated being bored. Sure, he'd practiced being still and having patience back at Manticore. In some operations, it was necessary to lie still for hours, waiting, but that didn't make it any less mind numbing. Really, the idea of doing it on his, for lack of a better term, vacation time, just made him that much more willing to eat a bullet instead.

Between his options of obsessing about Rachel and his own forthcoming, very likely horrible death, one might think Alec would rather just count the blood stains on the pavement. But he didn't get a choice, his mind skipped merrily around between all three without regard.

He was certain if he concentrated, he could find a way to blame it on Max. A glance at his watch, or rather, Rachel's doctor's watch, revealed that it was almost time. Max would be officially late in 8...7...

That was when he heard a low buzz crescendo into a loud roar that blew his hair back from his face as a black motorcycle rounded the turn into the alley and came to a sudden and complete stop in front of him.

"Oh good, you're here," Max said, as though _he_ was the one who might not show. She knocked the stand on her bike into place and pushed a pair of yellow sunglasses back off her eyes. "Ready?"

No. He wasn't ready. He was staring at the monster that almost killed him. "Where did you _get_ that?"

She smiled. "Wouldn't _you_ like to know?"

"Steal it?"

"Never steal anything you want to keep, Alec. Burglary 101."

The one class they hadn't taught at Manticore.

"Give me three minutes," Max said, as she wheeled her bike behind a crate and locked a chain to both wheels. "Then come in through the side."

"Don't touch my bike!" She called back as she blew past him, digging through her backpack.

Bitch. It was only the most entertaining thing he'd encountered since leaving Manticore. But then, she didn't know he'd been locked up in a secret government facility all his life. Surely, if she knew, she'd be more than happy to let him play with her toy. Or, more realistically, be terrified because he was an _assassin_.

Either way, she just didn't have enough information to make the decision, so he would have to do it for her.

And he chose to run his hands all over the smooth black metal, plastic and leather of her Kawasaki Ninja 650.

Which was how he found the tracking device.

XXX

Max was a fast climber and it would have been completely possible for her to haul herself up the wall to the open window on the second floor. But really, she was just gonna jump. Maybe the lazy way to go, but it would take Alec at least two minutes to stop feeling up her bike, so there was no way he'd see it.

"What's this?"

She'd severely overestimated the time frame, Max realized as she turned toward Alec's voice. In his hand dangled a small black, spidery object.

"High frequency GPS micro transmitter," she answered, automatically. She was going to kill that blackmailing son of a bitch. Granted, she didn't like killing people, but he wouldn't know that. For all he knew, she collected skulls in her bath tub and she wasn't about to disabuse the notion when she got a hold of him. Let him look over his shoulder the rest of his life. Bastard.

"What's it doing on your bike?" Alec asked.

"Did I not _just_ tell you not to touch my bike?" Okay, yes, she'd known he would, who could resist? But did he have to flaunt his wandering hands like every other man on the planet?

Beside the look of utter irritation that crossed his face, Alec ignored the question. "You have twenty seconds to explain this before I walk."

In the whirlwind of being blackmailed by an unknown entity, the fact that Alec was on the run from people and places unknown had slipped Max's mind. "I'm being blackmailed, okay? Has nothing to do with you."

"Says you."

It was easy to see where he was coming from. If he'd brought half the dramatic insanity to the table that she had, Max would walk too. Had already, in fact, when she left Logan to fend for himself. That didn't mean she was letting Alec get away with it. "God, you're a drama queen."

"I'm _what?_"

"If I wanted to find you. Or Rachel, or whoever's hiding. I did it. Hello, you're found. And no one that's after _me_ even knows you exist, so chill. You want to make some money or bitch some more?"

"You don't even care that someone's tracking you?"

It explained how the blackmailer was getting his information. He knew about Logan and knew where she lived, but not Jam Pony. That whole crew was safe unless he'd trailed her to Crash. "I'm dealing with it. Just put that thing back on my bike and get your ass to other side of the building."

XXX

This was the first big score he'd had a chance at and if he walked away, he got nothing. "If this hurts Rachel, I will kill you," he promised.

The amusement that flickered in her large brown eyes was galling. "You can try."

"You think I'm kidding," he said. "I'm not."

Max just shrugged. "Neither am I."

He wanted to drop kick her into the next sector just to prove he could, but that would obviously jeopardize his goal of making a shitload of money. But there was always tomorrow.

Reluctantly, he rounded the building, dropped the tracker on the seat of her bike and trotted back to _wait._ Again.

XXX

Max was up the building the second Alec was out of sight. Hoisting herself through the window, she dropped to the ground before anyone off the street noticed her hanging off the windowsill. She'd been worried her blackmailer might be watching, somehow, but they were using technology to do that for them. Soon enough, they'd realize it was a huge mistake. Given what they knew about her life, it was surprising they weren't more worried that she would just kick their door down and kill them.

Another mistake.

Max slinked along the darkened hallways of what seemed like just a normal office building, but the carpeting had been long ripped out and the cubicle walling provided a second barrier on the wall. An extra guard from stray or aimed bullets. Graffiti marked the walls, but she didn't recognize a signature, which raised flags. She'd been all over the city as a messenger and she had a photographic memory. Gangs all tagged their territory with similar markings.

Either it was a group she'd never heard of or the place was set up to look like something it wasn't. Instinct said to turn and run, but there was the highly important issue of the money to consider.

That, and Alec was already freaking out about the job as it was. She couldn't just bail after she'd gave him the 'don't be a drama queen, get your ass to the other door' speech. Well, she could, but he really _might_ try to kill her.

The problem was, it wasn't _her_ ass on the line. It was his. The reason the job required two people was the security override required manual depression. Of the two jobs: Climbing the wall, breaking into the security room and opening the door had been assigned to Max. The problem with teaming up with a guy was they always felt the need to assign themselves the more dangerous stuff. Never mind that she was a hundred times more likely to be able to handle herself if the warehouse turned out to be guarded.

Max picked the lock on the security door, revealing a row of computers monitors connected to one large, buzzing machine. Every monitor showed a camera feed, but none were of the out doors. It looked like individual houses. Families.

The vast potential for evil struck her immediately, but she ignored it. This wasn't what she was there for. She didn't know what it meant. Quickly, she dropped her ass into the seat in front of the keyboard and brought up the security for the building.

XXX

Outside, Alec danced from foot to foot with nervous energy.

Had he really expected that his only contact in the criminal world wouldn't bring her own baggage? It wasn't like Max was the be all and end all of thieves. There was nothing stopping him from meeting more, though whether their lives would be any less crazy than Max's was another issue.

It was really only moments before the thick metal garage-like door opened. Alec didn't have time to think about the fact that Max was a hell of a quick climber before armed men ran from the building. He was on the move immediately. Four men, two groups of two.

And to think, he hadn't been having fun.

There was something about a real fight that was so refreshing. It wasn't the same at Manticore, battling it out with equals to try to gain some minor advantage. Every punch counted and anyone could win at the end of the day. Humans weren't even a hint of a threat. The men wouldn't even know what hit them when they woke up.

They could barely even _see _him, he moved so fast. The first pair were easy, a hit each and they were down before they knew where he was. He could hear the pop of gunfire in the night air. Running up the side of the wall, he pushed off the building, relieved the gun from one man and threw an elbow into the face of the other.

He admired the gun in his hand as finally came to a standstill, smiling. Forty millimeter HK with custom sights. It was made for someone who could hit a target and that someone was squinting at him in the dim light emanating from the inside.

"Sorry," Alec apologized. "Got ahead of myself."

As Alec tucked the HK into the back of his pants, it's owner threw a punch that may have hurt if it landed, but Alec grabbed the thug's arm as it went by and swung his body around to tuck the man's neck into a choke hold.

It took longer than a simple, crushing blow to wait for the guy to stop struggling and truly pass out, but it was a _really_ nice gun.

The least he could do was not leave a mark.

XXX

They'd agreed on fifteen minutes, in and out. Open the door for two, wait thirteen as Alec grabbed the loot and open for another sixty seconds for him to clear the door before she climbed back down the wall.

So, for thirteen minutes, Max gave in to her morbid curiousity and searched through screen after screen of what was on the computer. The video uplinks to the monitors only scratched the surface. There was page after page of files, collected over a period of years. The people didn't seem to know they were being watched and other than the fact that they tended to be of a higher income bracket, the families in the video files were doing nothing special.

It felt off. It was too much trouble to be simple burglary, especially since they would have had to be in the house already to set the cameras in the first place, why not just clean them out then?

She wasn't there to solve the mystery. They were supposed to be hitting the storage housing of a local gang for a specific target. Easy in, easy out.

Max took a glance down at her watch. Thirty seconds. She looked around for disks.

XXX

The storage facility was massive, housing one of the best private weapons arsenal that Alec had ever seen. Granted, he was more accustomed to government facilities, so it wasn't like it was _that_ impressive, but still. Gun racks circled the room. AKs on the top level. Sub-automatic toward the bottom. The rest of the room was filled with ammo, other munitions, vehicles and detonation devices. He didn't see any C4 on the premises, which was good, since the place would go off like a nuke if they weren't careful.

It looked like they were planning a revolution. Which, all things considered, not the worst idea, if they could offer something better than the current crap-ass government that Alec had spent his life suffering for.

The problem with the whole set up was he wasn't there for weapons or ammo. That didn't mean he wouldn't grab anything that caught his fancy, but what they were after wasn't military grade or he would have stayed about as far away from the job as possible.

He was looking for _Gazgo!_, a horrifically named, but very effective gas supplement discontinued in the late 90s. It was a tiny capsule that, when put into a gas tank, increased gas efficiency by ten. The downside, and the reason they stopped making it, was it didn't work if the temperature dropped past fifty below. It brought a school bus to a halt in Northern Michigan and the damn kids were a whole hour late. The lawsuit killed the company that owned the patent.

But in Seattle, temperatures hadn't gone that low in decades. Plus, anyone with a kid going to school sent them in a limo like the rest of the rich bastards. So given the gas shortage, _Gazgo! _was better than gold.

The reason for its presence in command central was probably the ten ton Humvees that seemed to be glaring at Alec from their place under the Uzis. Fat monsters probably guzzled seven capsules a day and still needed a refill, but that only meant there was a huge ass pay day just waiting for Alec to find it.

Really, it made it a lot easier to locate shit when there was no incentive to keep the room clean and no one to see him blur.

Of course, if he'd known that they weren't hiding it, and in fact, kept a massive bag next to the Humvee with the gas can, it would have been even faster.

But he wouldn't have found the sniper rifle.

XXX

Max's feet hit the street pavement only seconds before Alec turned the corner. "No problems?" she asked, trying to seem casual, like she hadn't just landed.

For just a second, Alec smiled. "Check it out," he said, turning his body to reveal the large bag hoisted over his shoulder.

"You bring me something, Santa? I've been a really good girl."

Alec just watched her as she stepped forward, hand outstretched. She'd been kind of going a joke route and she really wished he'd quit it with the serious act twenty-four seven. Not that he wasn't perfectly entitled, but God, what a downer. "Good to know," he said finally.

"What, that I know how to behave myself?"

"That you lie with a straight face," he corrected. "I know you can't behave for shit." He tried for a full deadpan, but the expectant twinkle in his eyes gave him away as he watched for her reaction.

She smacked him, earning a _See? _expression that made her laugh.

"I had deception training as a child," she explained. "Let's go."


	3. Chapter 3

_Many thanks to jewel for never letting me post this with missing words and whatnot. Also, for insisting that I post it in the first place. _

**Carnal Knowledge**

_by scarlet (superscar)_

Chapter Three

It didn't escape Alec's notice that it was an odd thing to say as he trotted after her. Deception training was strange joke material, but then, Max was a strange girl. "And no one trained you to keep that information to yourself?"

"They tried. Don't really like taking orders."

The image of Max in something as colorless as camouflage danced in his mind. Well, marched soulessly with a long line of soldiers from his unit. The very idea of _Max_ going by a designation was ridiculous and almost obscene.

"Who does?" he asked, though he kind of missed it. Being thrown into a life or death decision making scenario his first time out was hardly ideal. But if he could just wander through life like Max seemed to, then he'd love to replace his 'Yes, Sir' with a 'Fuck off.'

They would shoot him in the head, but that would be better than the alternative.

Just then, Max stopped walking. "How the hell did you get here?"

As it happened, he'd come on foot. He didn't have a sector pass, so even if he'd stolen someone else's transportation, he couldn't have gotten far. "What do you care?"

"We can't exactly take my bike back to Jimmy."

He'd pushed the whole issue with the tracker to the back of his mind. "What difference does it make? Either we walk and it tracks your bike nowhere or you leave it behind and it does the same thing."

Max did an about face toward her bike and Alec's stomach practically flipped over, realizing what it would mean. She didn't miss the reaction, either. "I know you just want to ride my bike."

Alec could care less if she knew. "If it makes you feel better, your presence will really bring down my enjoyment."

"It does. Thanks," she said. And punched him. _Again._

Once his shoulder regained feeling, he fully intended to hit her back.

XXX

Even though she put the chains on her bike, Max was always worried it wouldn't be there when she got back. Since she could almost never guarantee it would, she breathed a sigh of relief every time she found it again, unharmed.

Really, she should probably pick up her own tracker, just in case.

"If you think about it," Alec said, "Since I'm heavier, it really makes a lot more sense if I drive."

Funny. For a guy depressed off his ass, he was quite a comedian. "Dead weight's optional. You can walk if you really want to." She unhooked the chain from the wheels and dropped the tracker next to the wall. "On or off, Pretty Boy?"

She slid onto the leather seat and kicked the stand out of the way. It was strange to feel someone climb on behind her, let alone in the dexterous way Alec managed it. Cindy and Sketchy had each gotten the occasional ride back home after a few crazy nights at Crash and had barely made the trip without falling off. To be fair, they'd been both been completely trashed at the time.

This was probably her first trip with a sober person.

He wasn't touching her, which was impressive since he would have to hold himself very still to manage it. Of course, it wouldn't last once they got going. She didn't ride her Ninja for relaxation. "Don't lose the bag," she told him and turned her key in the engine.

XXX

They'd taught everyone at Manticore how to drive a car, fly a plane and ride a motorcycle, but they'd never covered the subject of what to do in or on the backseat. Either they thought the answer was obvious or weren't worried about the situation presenting itself.

Belatedly, as Max's engine roared to life, Alec realized that he couldn't realistically stay on the bike without touching her. It was possible for _him, _maybe. But it wouldn't be for the ordinary non-genetically gifted individual she believed him to be.

Even as he realized it had to be done, he had no idea where the hell to he put his free hand. As a rule, Alec didn't lay a hand on any women out of combat situations. He'd been trained pretty specifically on the what-not-to-touch and it had been pretty much everything. Rachel had been the only exception.

Max didn't wait for him to grab hold, either she hadn't noticed he wasn't fully situated or she didn't care. As she pulled away, he grabbed desperately for her shoulder, which she shrugged, wiggling away from him. Did she _want_ him to fall off?

His knees locked around her hips automatically as they rounded the corner and his free hand reached helplessly.

"God," he heard her mutter, taking her hand from the throttle to place his around her stomach.

Apparently, she _didn't_ want him to fall. Yet. "Hold on," she warned. All he could feel was the leather of her jacket, but he was more than aware that it would be unwise to move his fingers in either direction.

He could feel the engine revving underneath him as they accelerated. The buildings flew by at a blur, which, luckily, he was used to. Wind whipped Max's hair in his face and he could feel himself squeeze her body against him as they ducked around corners. He'd been taught to slow down for that sort of thing, but Max loved the turns. She held her breath every time they curved, just inches from the ground, practically dragging their legs through dirt with the inertia.

It couldn't have been more dangerous.

Or fun.

XXX

For someone who had never been on the back of a motorcycle, Alec took to it almost immediately, copying her movements like it was instinct. She loved the feel of his hand tightening around her waist every time they took a corner.

He should have been terrified, but when they finally came to a stop inside Jimmy's chop shop, he didn't move. "Oh. We're there?"

"Sorry. Ride's closing up for the night."

Slowly, Alec's hand fell from around her waist and he lifted himself off the bike. "Whoa," he shook himself, holding his head for a second.

"Dizzy?" Max asked. Mission accomplished.

"I guess." He tested his balance gingerly. Apparently, she knocked him around more than she thought.

"You'll be fine. Hey Jimmy!" she yelled. "Don't have all night!"

She heard distant grumbles and heavy steps that reverberated down a mesh metal staircase that led to Jimmy's inner sanctum, where Max pictured a tiny TV, shag carpet and a hot plate.

"So..." she tried to fill the relative silence, pulling Alec out of whatever drama was going on in his head.

"What?" he asked. "Oh. Yeah. So... we should do this again sometime."

"Sure you can take it?"

"All that and more," he promised, circling the bike.

Somehow, it seemed worse that he was happy, almost excited about the bike knowing that as soon as the distraction ended, he'd wilt.

The insistent beeping of her pager drew Max's attention and she couldn't help cringing when she read the number.

"What's that?" Alec asked.

"A pager," Max deflected.

"Thanks, Max. Very educational. I meant, what's that look? Who called? Ex-boyfriend?"

"I wish." She could just ignore an ex without paying them a fortune. Alec reached for the pager, but she smacked his hand away. "It doesn't show his name."

"But you admit it's a him. We're getting somewhere. Bootie call?"

XXX

It was the first time he'd had a chance to use the term, but the way Max's eyes narrowed, Alec could tell he'd said it right. There was no sign of that placid 'roll with the punches' expression she'd had since he'd known her. In fact, she looked kinda pissed.

He could work with it.

"It's the blackmailer," she told him, relenting. "God, you're annoying."

Strange how satisfying it was, to be _allowed_ to be annoying. He could finally say whatever came to his mind and the most it would get him was an eye roll or another oddly painful hit to the shoulder. She really did have a hell of a punch for an ordinary.

"So what's the story there? Sex tape?"

He was a hundred percent sure that whatever it was, it _wasn't_ porn that got Max into this mess, so when she looked at the floor, shifting uncomfortably, his stomach dropped. "_Seriously?_"

She looked up at him slowly, eyes huge and lips trembling. "He didn't tell me he was taping."

"I- I didn't -" Alec scrambled to think of something to say.

"I'm kidding, jack ass."

Relief hit first, followed swiftly by annoyance. She'd totally had him for a moment. Maybe she _did_ take deception training as a child. He tried to hold on to righteous anger, but he couldn't help being a little impressed.

"C'mon, Max, what's more embarrassing than porn?"

Behind him, he heard a sigh. "Discussing it in front of your buyer?"

Apparently, the large, clomping steps Jimmy had taken to get him down the stairs had finally lead him to their vicinity. He'd gone so slow, Alec just got used to the noise.

That, coupled with the dizziness and he was seriously off his game.

It could mean nothing, or it could be the first step to the end.

"So, let's see what has you waking up an old man, Maxie."

Alec felt the large bag disappear from his fingers as Max yanked it away, opening it up to show their buyer the goods. Of course, that wasn't all that was in there.

"What the hell is this?"

XXX

There was a rectangular box with a handle sticking out of the large pile of _Gazgo! _gel caps. It almost looked like a suitcase, but it was too thin for clothes. There was really only one thing that she could imagine it might be and her stomach squeezed as she pulled it out of the bag.

"Well?" she asked, waiting for an answer from Alec while Jimmy coughed uncomfortably.

"Not your problem."

"Oh, yeah? I bust my ass to get you inside to steal, what?" Max flipped the clasps and opened the case, somehow hoping it wouldn't be what she knew she'd find inside. It was, though. She known it would be. "Well, at least you got the one with the silencer."

"I don't deal in any of that," Jimmy said. "Can give you a name, though."

"That'd be great," Alec said.

"It'll cost ya."

Max cut in quickly, trying to push Alec's stupidity to the back of her mind. She could kick his ass later. "Let's just get on with this. We want sixty."

"Deal was fifty."

"Pretty sure I heard _at least_ fifty. Isn't that right, Alec?"

"I heard you can make a hundred bucks a pop on the street," Alec agreed.

"Fine," Jimmy grumbled. "This is about the car."

"Just supply and demand," Max insisted. It was actually about paying off an insistent extortionist, but he didn't need to know that.

Jimmy pulled out a metal box and started counting cash. _Very slowly._ Max wanted to explode just waiting for him. "Thirty each," he said finally, reaching toward them with both hands. "You want to count it?" he asked.

"Already did," Max folded the cash over in her hand and shoved it into the pocket of her bag. "Let's go," she shoved Alec toward the door and followed with her bike.

"Good luck with the domestics," Jimmy muttered under his breath behind them.

XXX

Max had gone from fun to insane in a matter of seconds and Alec had no idea what her problem was. Sure, he grabbed something extra. They had the space, though, so what the hell? Wasn't that what thieves did? Steal things?

"It's not like I won't cut you in for half," Alec tried to head off the fight he could see brewing in her eyes the second she closed the door to the chop shop.

"You think I want half of _that?_" Max asked, glaring at the case in his hand like it was a contagious virus.

"Fine. I'll take it all, then. What's your problem?"

"You! You're really going to be getting into the business of arming snipers? You think anyone uses that shit for a good cause?"

"Like everything you've ever snagged has been for charity?" Alec didn't bother telling her that he might not sell it at all. Obviously, that wouldn't go over well.

"It's different," Max insisted. "Guns kill people. God, men are all the same."

He couldn't _win _with her because he couldn't tell her anything. Max thought Alec was some kid trying to make a buck that hadn't considered the firepower he was messing with. He couldn't explain that he had actually put a lot of thought into it and decided it was possible he might have to kill people and wanted it to be clean. She would only be _more_ horrified, and for some reason, that made him furious.

"People kill people, Max. Guns just make it more efficient. Believe me, it's better that way."

The look she gave him, like he was some kind of _animal_ made his insides burn. So what if he was? What if he was several spliced into one?

"Do you even hear yourself? Are you seriously advocating shooting people?"

Alec shrugged. "Could be worse." He'd seen it.

"Whatever. So what's the plan? Walk up to an arms dealer and ask for money?"

Why was he even listening to this? She wasn't his C.O. "Why do you even care?" Alec walked past her. They made sixty grand, he wanted to enjoy it for two seconds before he spent the night staring at Rachel.

Max followed him. "I just don't like guns, people can get hurt -"

"Not _that._" Alec spun on her, invading her personal space until she backed up against the wall. "Why do you care about _me_? What does it matter what I do?"

Finally, Max was scared of him. Her breath sped up and she was watching him carefully, body on guard for attack. Maybe on some instinctual level, she could tell how easily he could snap her neck. "You're gonna get yourself killed."

He already had. "That's my problem."

"Whatever, if you don't care, why should I?" Max tried to pull away but this time he was the one to block her way.

"_Exactly_. You shouldn't."

"Well, someone has to!"

He hated the look in her eyes, like somehow, he'd become her responsibility and she would help him if it killed her. Because she thought he needed it.

She didn't know it was too late.

"Max, you don't know me. You wouldn't want to. I don't need your help and you can shove your pity."

"Alec -"

"That's not my name! Deal with your own fucking problems and leave me alone."

He turned around and she didn't follow. When he turned the corner, he heard the revving of her motorcycle slowly fade into the distance.

XXX

_That's not my name!_ banged around inside Max's brain and she couldn't drive fast enough to escape it. Of course it wasn't his name. It fit him, but she knew she'd just pulled it out of the air and stuck it to him in the blink of an eye.

Alec's real name, whatever it was, his mother probably spent months trying to come up with.

Max hadn't spent much time trying to figure out who Alec was, though his mystery intrigued her. Maybe it was simple. Maybe he really was the guy who didn't give a shit if he pedaled guns to the highest bidder. For all she knew, he'd been doing it all his life. Loving one girl didn't necessarily make him a good person.

He was right about one thing, though, she definitely needed to show her friendly neighborhood blackmailer what he was really getting into.

The drop was set for an abandoned apartment too disgusting for even the most desperate squatters. It was the site of a now famous shoot out between the Sector Police and a local gang. Plenty of civilians caught in the crossfire. The manpower sucked up the city's limited resources and the mess wasn't cleaned up for months. By that time, it was too late to remove the stain of the blood and smell of vomit, rotting flesh and defecation. It attracted most of the rats in the city, literal and metaphorical, and became the drop place for anything you didn't want to see again.

Max could barely breathe, the smell was so overpowering and she couldn't help wondering if it was purposeful on the part of her blackmailer. Was there something that she should be smelling but couldn't? Or was this just punishment for calling so late?

As she climbed the stairs, she couldn't help being glad she'd left her motorcycle on the street. The clothes would have to be burned. How the hell was he planning to get to the money? Was he actually going to follow her footsteps into the filth to get the money?

Max slipped a thick envelope under the third doorway on the right hand side. She couldn't hear anyone inside, but she didn't know who was watching or where they were watching from.

As long as they thought they were seeing money... that's all she really needed until she found an unsuspecting vehicle willing to house a new tracker.

When they grabbed the 'money,' they were getting the ass kicking of a lifetime.

And Max had a lot of ass kicking juice waiting to get the show on the road. She blurred down the stairs to get the hell out of the rotting squalor.

Once she was outside, breathing in the comparatively fresh air of downtown Seattle, she heard it. Just a ping, but it was recognizable enough, the muffled explosion of a bullet through a silencer. She moved, but it was too late.

The microsecond before the pain was like years as Max tried to dodge. It wasn't the first time someone tried to shoot her, but no bullet landed the same place twice. This one hit just below the clavicle sending fire down the entire left side of her body.

Absurdly, as Max hit the ground, all she could think about was how this was _exactly_ the kind of thing that could happen if idiots like Alec just sold guns on the street to the highest bidder. Of course, she hadn't really wanted to illustrate the point.

Her vision faded in and out with the pain, but Lydecker's voice was in her head, yelling at her to stay awake. _Alert to the threat, soldier!_

Blurry as he was, Max could see the shooter next to her motorcycle, ready to take another shot, but he didn't. He walked nearer, closing in on her.

Blood pumped from her shoulder and she could feel the movement of every heartbeat.

"Bet you didn't know he had a son," the man said.

It made no sense. How much blood had she lost? "Who?" she asked.

"Do all your assassinations just blur together after awhile?"

"Not me," she got out. Every breath stretched her torn pectoral muscle, sending the nerve endings screaming. "Wrong person." She wanted to tell him that she didn't even _like_ guns, but it took too much energy.

She lay on her injured side. It didn't make sense from a medical perspective. The weight on her left side made it more likely she could faint at any moment, but her soldier's instincts needed to leave her right hand free.

"I'm sure that's what he said too, right before you shot him. Right after you tortured him. All his other clients were nobody. It had to be you."

_Vogelsang._ "Lydecker."

"You'd think... if he hadn't been looking for him today. Nice try. I'll be sure to tell him about that friend of yours."

He was going to kill her. She could tell the way he lifted the gun in his hand that he wouldn't stop shooting until she was dead. If he stayed where he was, there was no way she could move fast enough to get away.

So she did the only thing she could think of. "He cried... like a girl."

Max could see both satisfaction and rage leap in Vogelsang Junior's eyes. He was barely any older than she was, but he was going to avenge his father's death and Max had just confirmed he was in the right.

But he was too angry to think about what he was doing.

His knuckles cracked against her cheekbone and it was no more than a pleasant distraction from her shoulder. He was close enough, now. She kicked out with her top leg, sweeping him onto his back. Air expelled from his lungs as he hit the ground and Max wasn't even sure he'd realized what was going on before she threw a hard sidearm punch with her right hand into the underside of his nose, sending the cartilage straight into his brain.

It was a death blow Lydecker had taught at Manticore, if you needed to take out the enemy with one punch.

Max hadn't intended to use it. Ever.

But she hadn't intended to need it either.

_People kill people, Max._

The body was still twitching as she pushed herself to her feet and started the slow walk to her motorcycle. She ground the tracker under her heel before she drove away.

XXX

The look on Max's face when he'd said 'Alec' wasn't his name kept dancing in front of his face unpleasantly. Even in his own imagination, she wouldn't just leave him the hell alone.

Possibly because he liked to be Alec. _Could_ be Alec if he had a few more months to live.

He didn't tell Rachel about the fight at first. Partially because he didn't really think she'd understand and also because her lack of response generally made him feel like a crazy person.

Maybe he already was. His brain chemistry would be the first thing to go, so maybe this was just the first symptom.

The problem was, he hated silence. Max was good for noise, even the yelling kind.

"We don't need her," he said finally. "She's cutting into profit. Plus, she has people after her..."

Max was a magnet for trouble and he already had plenty of gravitational force on his own without bringing her into it. It made 100% perfect sense. She was a liability.

"She hates guns," he added. Not that Rachel was a particular fan. But it wasn't the same. Rachel lived in a world apart from all that. _Max_ was a criminal. She should have a Glock in every pocket.

Not that he really knew her anymore than she did him. Just because she stole things and took corners at 80 mph didn't make her a violent person by nature.

The fact that she couldn't stop hitting him seemed like an indicator, though.

Maybe she was a knife person.

Or maybe it didn't matter what kind of person she was because he'd never see her again.

"You gotta wake up, Rachel." He put his head down next to hers and tried to think about nothing. Just a nice, empty blackness to slip into for a few hours.

He was almost successful when a breathless voice interrupted his rest. "Alec?"

His body reacted before his brain, already on his feet and on the way toward the door. Max was there, he realized. She was the only person that called him by name.

Was he not clear enough? He wanted to yell at her in frustration, but she looked all wrong, like she was about to collapse.

Then, he smelled the blood. It was pumping out of her shoulder even as she tried to hold it in place with her hand. Fuck. It was a lot of blood.

Max stepped toward him, off balance and he blurred forward, not caring if she could see him do it. He caught her before she hit the floor and she sent him a lazy half smile. A dark bruise was forming on her cheekbone. "No doctors," she said.

"Are you insane? Max, what happened?"

She weighed next to nothing and he swung her into his arms and laid her on one of the other hospital beds. Immediately, the white sheets started turning red.

"Shot," she said, as though the whole event were surreal to her. Then, "Told you... Guns..."

Leave it to Max to be too damn stubborn to see a doctor, or go into a dangerous situation packing, but still take the time to tell him 'I told you so' while she was bleeding out.

He kind of wanted to shoot her himself.

Except she fainted and her hand fell away from the wound at her shoulder. He knew exactly where she'd been shot and it had to have nicked an artery or she wouldn't be bleeding like she was.

So she wanted to just drop at his feet dying? Well, fuck her.

She would live even if he had to wake up every doctor in the hospital. That in mind, he pushed his own fingers into the hole in Max's shoulder and started yelling.

A nurse appeared in the doorway almost immediately. One he knew. Perfect. "Hey Donna. How many doctors on this floor right now?"

Donna's eyes flicked from Rachel to Max, trying to figure out the situation. "None. We'd have to pull someone from the ER."

"Know any up for some freelance work off the books?"

She didn't answer, but Alec took the silence to mean yes.

"No cops," he clarified, in case it wasn't obvious. "Go!"

It was three long minutes of staring at the sweat beading on Max's forehead before a doctor walked through the door and Alec wanted to hit him for not running. Donna pushed a cart of medical supplies in behind him.

"Dr. Jameson. What's the situation, here?"

"Gunshot wound to the upper thoracic cavity, bullet nicked the brachial artery, but didn't break through the shoulder blade. It's still in there."

"You're a doctor?"

"EMT," Alec corrected. Field medic was closer to the truth, but that wasn't what he was interested in telling. "The second I let go of this, she could bleed out."

"Gunshot wounds need to be repor-"

Alec could tell what the weaseling bastard was doing and cut to the chase. Awkwardly, he pulled his cash out of his right pocket with his left hand. "Thirty grand. Bottom line." He tossed it on the covers. They had to save her first.

Jameson turned to Donna, "Grab the other side."

Together, they wheeled the bed from the wall and pulled on latex gloves and fixed a bright light over Max's shoulder. "Okay, be prepared to let go in 3...2...1..."

Alec let go and stepped back for Dr. Jameson to step in. Sure enough, Max started bleeding immediately, but he no longer had to watch and didn't. "Major rupture to the brachial artery. We need to repair that first, then take out the bullet."

His hands were dirty, he realized. Not just the blood that covered them, but the grime under his fingernails. Was that in her bloodstream? Even if they repaired the damage, would he have killed her because he hadn't washed his hands after the mission?

"She's lost too much blood."

On his feet again, Alec stalked over to where Jameson was putting Max's artery back together. "What do you mean, too much? Put more in her."

"We don't know her blood type and we can't get any units of blood without putting it _on the books_," Donna told him.

Donna was going to get herself thrown through a window if she wasn't careful.

Alec rolled up his left sleeve. "Use mine. O neg. She'll be fine."

"You're the boss." Donna shoved a needle none too gently into the largest vein in his arm and he watched as his blood slid around the spiral of the clear plastic tubing.

He sat carefully at the foot of Max's bed as, finally, he heard Dr. Jameson's sigh of relief and the metalic _ping_ of the bullet hitting the tray.

"From the outside, this will just look like a few stitches, but there's a lot of internal damage. The bullet hit her shoulder blade. It didn't go through, but there might be a minor fracture, internal bruising. Probably a cracked rib, maybe two."

"Thanks for the specifics," was out of Alec's mouth before he thought about it.

"You want to keep her off the books," Jameson bit back. "That means no X-rays. It'll take a few months before she'll be able to use that shoulder again."

Which meant no climbing into strange buildings or riding her motorcycle. Months and months of doing _nothing_.

Alec couldn't wait to tell her.

XXX

Pain screamed at her to wake up and Max's eyes shot open as she looked around, disoriented. Her head shot off the bed, jostling the rest of her body. _Fuck! _It felt like little tiny monsters had crawled into her shoulder and lit bonfires on every single nerve ending.

Max was going to kill each and every one of them.

"Morning, Maxie."

Very, _very_ slowly, she turned her head toward the voice she'd already recognized. _Alec._ Or, the person who had been Alec. He looked awful. Awful for him, anyway. His eyes were shadowed, contrasting the bright light of the sun that streamed through the venetian blinds behind him. Had he been there all night? "How did I get here?" she asked.

He was sitting backwards on a chair, lazily leaning his chin on his arms and his arms on the headrest. His eyelids drooped, but there was a manic light in his pupils that made her nervous. "I'd assume you drove your bike, though with your arm practically falling off, I'm not sure how."

Painfully was the only answer, to the best of her recollection. Everything after she was shot was a haze of desperation. She couldn't remember knowing where she was going, only that she had to get there.

"What happened?"

"You lived."

"Doesn't feel like it."

"Small justice. Oh, and you owe me thirty grand."

"You called a doctor," she realized. What else had she expected, going to a hospital?

"You're welcome."

Max tried to focus on a game plan instead of the way a quarter of her body begged for death. "Is it... did you keep it off the books?"

"Why do you think it cost thirty thousand dollars?"

"You couldn't get them down to twenty?" Max grumbled. That was practically her entire stash.

"Next time, I'll let you bleed out while I negotiate."

She felt energetic enough except for the brain killing agony. "How much blood did I lose?"

"Plenty, they had to give you an extra couple pints."

Shit. Human blood could keep her alive, but that wasn't the concern. Hospitals didn't just give that stuff out, they ran tests first. "Did they run tests?" she asked quickly, trying to seem nonchalant.

"No time. Had to use a universal donor."

Max didn't think to ask _who _the universal donor might be, too relieved that Harbor Lights Hospital was not, in fact, in possession of a blood sample from a unique, or nearly unique, Manticore Chimera prototype.

XXX

He wasn't sure why he was so reluctant to tell Max that he'd given her his own blood, but Alec was relieved she didn't press further. "Gonna tell me how you ended up shot?" he asked, when she finally turned her head away from him.

"Some idiot sold a jackass a gun."

So they were still on _that_. "You know, if _you_ had a gun, it would have been a more even battle." Not that he liked an even battle, himself. That would be a giant step down.

"Whatever."

"I can teach you how to shoot it."

Her response was a half laugh, half scoff that he'd never heard before, but came off sounding super offensive.

"Fine. See if I find you painkillers next time."

"I'm on _pain killers_?" she asked, proving to him that she was, in fact, in serious pain despite her lack of screaming. He hadn't been sure. With his blood flowing through her veins, it wasn't clear how soon she'd start healing, but he assumed she'd need more than a few hours. More likely a few weeks, even a month.

"Not yet." Alec balanced a morphine shot he'd snagged from the nurse's station on his finger. "Say the magic words."

"Inject me or I'll kick your ass, dick."

It was astonishing how believable she made the threat, when she'd had a bullet inside her body not 8 hours before and could barely move anything above her waist without flinching. "Is it that hard, Max? Say 'Pretty please, Alec.'"

"Too late, I've renamed you."

_Ouch_. Alec wasn't sure what to say. The hit went straight to his gut. She was taking away his name. It was an absurd thing to care about, since he'd gone by plenty of names on the outside. Really, 'Alec' was just the last in a series of aliases. Maybe that's why it mattered, because it was the name he would die with. The only thing about him that had nothing to do with Manticore.

"Have it your way." He tossed the syringe in Max's direction. She knocked off the cap, shook out the air bubbles and injected it like an addict. By the time she was feeling better, she probably would be. Which reminded him… "The doctor said you'll be fine. You just can't use that shoulder for the next three months."

Max froze. "_Three_ months? No way!"

It wasn't hard to follow her train of thought as her face took on the downward spiral of realization after realization of the things she couldn't be doing for the next three months and the horrific nothingness that awaited her. Alec almost wished he could be there to see her go rapidly insane.

"No _way_," she repeated.

Alec got up from his chair, sliding it back to its place next to Rachel's bed. "I'm sure if you say that enough, you'll be able to walk right on out of here." He sat back down, letting his head fall to Rachel's mattress as he slipped into his first deep and restful sleep.

XXX

The idea of doing absolutely nothing for three months made every atom within Max's body want to explode. While she healed faster than normal people, it would still probably be a few weeks before she was feeling better and more than a month to get back to her regularly scheduled ass kicking. Even a few weeks without riding her motorcycle was too long.

She didn't _sleep_. What the hell could she do? Catch up on her reading?

The only thing worse than death by boredom was the idea of Alec just _watching_ her inner torment. She could tell it was entertaining the sadistic bastard.

Just the even breath out of his nostrils, so different from her own shakey inhalation, made Max want to smack the shit out of him and she couldn't even do that!

The genetic material of animals spliced into Max's DNA may have made her stronger and faster than humans, but the increased metabolism made it almost impossible for her to sit still. Even the most minor movement created a ripple effect that went straight to her shoulder.

It hurt like hell, but it also made it really obvious when the morphine kicked in.

XXX

By the time Alec woke up, the streams of light through the window had disappeared. He wasn't sure at first whether he'd managed to sleep until darkness or if the clouds had rolled out their usual blanket over the city skyscape.

Unconsciously, he stretched, cracking his neck as he moved it back to into alignment.

It was the first day he hadn't woken up with the sound of an alarm, real or imaginary. He wasn't immediately alert, still drowsy from sleep. "Morning, Rachel," he murmured, nuzzling her hand.

She didn't react.

"It does look more like evening. You have a point."

Belatedly, it occurred to Alec that he should maybe hold off his one-way conversation with the woman who was only conscious in his imagination since Max was in a nearby bed, feeling sorry for him.

Was it a better or worse sign for his sanity that he had absolutely no concern that she might think he was crazy?

He hoped she'd fallen asleep and snuck a glance in her direction only to find the bed stripped and a pile of what better be $30,000 laying where Max used to be.

She was gone.

Was she fucking _insane_?

XXX

Morphine didn't last long in the transgenic blood stream. It was a correction Manticore should really look into for their next upgrade.

She'd stolen a sling from the hospital and immobilized her shoulder as much as she possibly could, but even the vibration of her Ninja rippling through her body was movement enough to make a difference once the painkillers were gone.

Driving the bike wasn't the problem. Sure, she couldn't take the corners with any kind of style and for the first time in her life, Max was actually somewhat worried about falling off, but she could hold the wheel steady with one hand.

What she would have real trouble doing was getting it into her apartment. The best plan she'd come up with was getting Kendra to help and the idea was so pathetic, she was embarrassed just thinking it.

Just because no one knew she was genetically engineered didn't mean she could just go around, having people help her lift shit. It wasn't right.

Unfortunately, there was no way she could manage to _drive _her bike up the stairs with one arm.

It took her far too many precious seconds to get up to her apartment, leaving her bike unattended. When she spilled into the apartment, she was actually relieved to see that Kendra had company, though she didn't love their location choice.

"Seriously? We eat off that counter."

"Max!" Kendra jumped off the counter immediately, pulling clothing back on as she went. "You're early and… oh my god, what happened?" Completely forgetting to button back up, Kendra was at Max's side immediately, stopping just short of actually touching her injury.

She'd thought about this answer ahead of time. "Dislocated shoulder," Max explained. Hopefully the time it took a transgenic to heal from a bullet would seem like a reasonable amount of time to wait for pulling a shoulder out of its socket. "Hurts like hell."

"What happened?"

"Oh, some jack ass came out of no where. I went one way, bike went another… but I didn't let go."

Exasperated, Kendra turned to her companion. "Can you believe this girl? Cares more about her bike than losing an arm."

"It's a Ninja," Max explained.

"Sorry, babe. Gotta go with your friend. Ninja's worth a couple limbs, for sure."

When he put it that way, it didn't even feel like manipulation when she said, "Then you wouldn't mind helping me bring it up here?"

XXX

Alec searched every alley around Harbor Lights, looking for Max's bike. Either she hadn't had it with her the night before, which was unlikely, or she'd managed to move it. Probably, she'd had another friend of hers move it for her because he couldn't imagine how she'd be able to drive it with a ripped up shoulder, even if she _was_ on morphine.

He would have _loved_ to drive her bike for her. Which, of course, she knew, and had deliberately not let him.

Psychotic bitch. He was going to really enjoy it when she showed up later with her stitches ripped open.

XXX

Her skin had closed, but the scar was there and she still couldn't move any of her body without feeling pain in her chest and shoulder blade.

Max kicked her boot across the room, knocking the bag that carried all her B & E supplies off the shelf and onto the floor. It was heavy, so it made a huge crashing sound. That, and it took the rest of the temporary shelving unit with it.

"Jesus, Max, what the hell?" Kendra asked, coming through the door in a rush.

"Make me a sandwich, pretty please?" Max asked.

Put out, Kendra didn't jump right on the task. "You can't just ask politely like a normal person?"

"I said please."

"You didn't have to attack the wall."

"I'll fix it when I can move again," Max promised. "Oh, do we have any ice? It's super hot in here."

Kendra put a cool hand to Max's forehead. "I think you have a fever. Is your shoulder infected or something?"

"Dislocated shoulders don't get infected." Bullet wounds did, of course, but the stitching was already healed. If anything was infected, there was nothing she could do about it.

"I'll put some water in the back of the fridge. Should freeze in a couple hours."

"Your man still here?" Max asked. She hadn't heard any of the not-so-subtle sounds of coitus in a few hours.

"Had to go back to base."

"A soldier?" Max asked. She hadn't been looking at him too carefully when she'd come through the door, but he'd managed to get her bike up the stairs without too much trouble. "Pretty ripped?"

"Like you wouldn't believe!" Kendra sighed. "He could hold me up against the wall. _Highly_ recommend that, by the way."

After their display on the kitchen countertop, it wasn't hard to visualize Kendra up against the wall with her soldier boy, but even as the image flashed, Max imagined herself taking Kendra's place as the man transformed before her eyes. She physically jerked herself from the image and pain exploded in her shoulder.

Distraction: Successful. Ouch.

"I've always had a weakness for extremely hot men," Kendra confessed, as though it were something other than common knowledge.

"You're not alone, sister-friend."

"Reeeally? You meet someone?" she asked.

"Oh, totally not," Max denied.

"Bull shit, who is it?"

Just talking about it was embarrassing, but it wasn't like he would ever find out. Plus, she'd never get her sandwich if she didn't give Kendra some dirt. Max was way too far into the conversation at this point. "It's nothing," she warned.

"A hot guy is never nothing, Max."

"Okay, I met a guy. Very good looking."

Kendra waved a hand for more. "Spare no detail."

"Tall. At least six feet. Fit. Total pretty boy but in the _good_ way." Max couldn't even think of how to do justice in explaining Alec's face. "His eyes are all like vulnerable and whatever. This greenish brown color."

"I'm pretty sure they call that hazel."

"Great lips!" Max added.

"Why are you not jumping his bones right now? Other than the obvious fact you can't move?"

Max was coming up blank. Why wasn't she throwing Alec on the nearest hospital bed? "Oh. He has a girlfriend."

Kendra grimaced. "Of course he does. They always do. Do you know her?"

It was hard to really _know_ someone you've only seen comatose, but it sort of counted. "Kinda."

"That sucks."

"Y'know what would make me feel better? Ice water. Seriously, how are you not dying?"

"Well, I'm not the one whose seen the guy. Maybe he's overheating your circuits."

Shit. It was like a dream that made no sense until it occurred to you to ask 'Is this a dream?' Max was overheating because she was in heat. She was having sexual fantasies about Alec because she was in heat. Perfectly normal.

In a totally wacked out, look at Max, the science project, sort of way.

Apparently, the powers that be decided they had not fucked with her enough. In addition to not being able to move, all she want to do was jump every breathing male. Or at least the last one she'd seen.

She hated heat more than seizures, more than the uncertainty of her existence or the way Lydecker wouldn't leave her the hell alone.

Max wasn't a naturally friendly person. She had a close-ish friendships with a select few individuals and a web of acquaintances for business purposes AKA thievery. Within her friendships, she was loving, huggy and all that.

Everyone else needed to stay the fuck out of her personal bubble.

But then every few months, she was overwhelmed by the urge to let some stranger smash right through that bubble and be as physically close to her as possible.

To say that the morning after was uncomfortable was a gross understatement. And then they always got so clingy. Wanting to get in with her friends and be the boyfriend, not that any of them had ever filled the role very well. But that's what she got for making these kinds of decisions in the middle of a hormone extravaganza.

There was something about sex that was interesting. In practice, she'd often been disappointed and rarely fully satisfied, but maybe she'd just yet to find someone good enough in the sack. That's what Kendra insisted.

The idea of spending the next three days laying helplessly in her bed, fantasizing about Alec was, well, hot, but she knew herself well enough to know she wouldn't be thrilled with it in 72 hours.

…but given her options, it was a lot more fun than lying around thinking about the guy she'd killed or the fact that Alec didn't want her around.

"We've got ham and cheese. And powdered lemonade."

Ice knocked together inside her drink as Kendra set it next to her. Max sat up to drink and every sexual fantasy was wiped from her mind as her nerve endings blasted her with pain. "Shit," she murmured.

It wasn't _as_ bad as it was at first, but it would be another week until she was really able to move.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"Fine," Max assured her. "So tell me more about Mr. Military."

"Seriously?" Kendra was practically bouncing with excitement, ready to spill everything.

Vicarious heat.

Maybe it would pass the time until she could actually get out of bed.

XXX

She didn't come back.

After their fight, he thought he'd gotten rid of her, but she'd shown up a couple of hours later with a bullet wound.

Apparently, Max hated him so much she was willing to risk re-opening her bullet wound to get away from him and had managed to cover her tracks.

He'd never see her again, unless they dragged her back in to Harbor Lights due to massive internal bleeding. At least she'd left him the money.

Well, most of it. $29,000. He couldn't believe she'd short changed him a measly thousand dollars, but he suspected she did it just to fuck with him.

He was well rid of her.

But he kept waiting for her to show up anyway. Whenever the nurses came in to take care of Rachel, to wash her or change her position, Alec would look up expecting to see Max.

At first, he expected to see her injured, regretting giving up the bed he'd so generously bought with her money.

When she didn't show up in the first couple weeks, he worried what might have happened to her. If she was lying in a ditch somewhere with his thousand dollars.

He tried to explain to Rachel that there was really nothing he could have done in the situation, and he couldn't be responsible for Max's horrifying lack of self-preservation, but then it struck him that she was probably fine.

There was no reason behind this certainty, but it would just be so typical. She managed to turn anything and everything around on him, why wouldn't Max be able to walk away with a bullet wound and stroll back into his life unscathed?

XXX

It took two weeks for Max to go back to work, another two to regain full motor function, though she was still tender.

"How's the cripple?" Cindy asked as Max opened up her locker.

"Perfect." To prove it, she lifted her backpack with her injured arm. Unfortunately, her arm decided it wasn't as ready as it thought and spasmed, sending her bag to the floor and something inside it skidding under the lockers. "Okay. Not perfect," she admitted.

"Now remember, sugar, this is love," Cindy told her, getting to her knees to reach beneath the lockers that could have God knows what beneath them. Max would just as soon buy a new whatever-it-was-she-lost than have to smell whatever resided there.

That was, until she recognized what was in Cindy's hand. "Didn't even know you had a computer," she said, handing over the black disk Max had copied the night she and Alec had stolen the _Gazgo!_

"I don't," Max said. "I'm holding it for a friend of mine."

"That rich guy from Crash?"

She realized Cindy was talking about Logan, whom she hadn't given much thought to in the past few weeks, what with the blackmail, getting shot, going into heat and generally preferring the company of people who didn't piss her off. "Yeah, Logan." He _was_ the only person she knew with an Internet connection.

"What is it?"

"Not sure. I'll have to ask him." Max wiped the hair and grime from the disk, shoved it back into her bag and headed over to the cage where Normal was going through packages. "Got anything for Sector Five?"

She was headed back to Harbor Lights.

_Additional notes: Thank you to angel for answering my medical inquiries. (Didn't want to spoil by adding that at the top.)_


	4. Chapter 4

**Carnal Knowledge**

_By scarlet (superscar)_

Chapter Four

The repeated thunk of military grade boots on concrete sent Alec into fighting mode. Ever since pealing Rachel's broken body from her cobblestone driveway, he'd been on the alert, ready for anything.

In some ways, he'd been waiting since the first transgenic was dragged down the hallway in February of 2009 after 599's unit made their ill fated escape attempt. Or in August, later that year, after the six months in psy-ops, proving his loyalty.

He spent almost a month coiled in anticipation, so the spring of his muscles into immediate action brought only relief at first.

The only goal was to lead them away. Grab their attention and make sure it didn't affect Rachel. Alec never even tried to escape. What difference did it make?

Pain ricocheted around his brain until Alec zeroed in on the exacting cut of the laser through the red haze of his vision. It would be worse this time. The pain became more pronounced, entering his reality with more precision and expertise.

It was getting harder to tell that none of it was real.

Someday, Rachel's bed would fade into the background and all he would be able to see would be the nightmares of his subconscious.

No one scared the shit out of Alec like Colonel Lydecker. It was partially the rumors. He'd been in charge of the unit that was so terrified of him that they'd tried to escape and Donald had shot every last one of those kids between the eyes.

He'd been surprised with the news, when he heard it. Lydecker wasn't one of the malicious ones. There were moments when it actually seemed like he cared on some level, or at least he'd bitten back the temptation to smack young 494 around for whatever slipped out of his mouth, unlike the rest of the commanders.

Not that Alec had been brave enough to fire off that particular weapon very often.

It was that minimal trust turned to dread that made Lydecker the worst of them. Usually, Alec found he could rely on his instincts. But the Colonel's soft voice made his hair stand on end.

"All you have is time, 494. Barely that." The voice echoed around the stringent corridors of the hospital as Alec waited next to Rachel's bed for them to finally come and end it all.

Maybe the marching feet and whispered warnings inside his head would be real and he'd finally find out if the rumors they told about Lydecker were true.

Already, the barrier of reality was beginning to shift.

The sounds were the worst. Usually, he could tell that the images his mind conjured didn't fit with the off-white, too often stained walls of Harbor Lights Hospital. But the footsteps that crashed against the steps in his mind were startling every time. It kept him on edge, ready to grab Rachel from her bed and leap through the window at any moment.

But he couldn't be by her side all the time.

Though Manticore ordered her death, Rachel was more or less meaningless. _He_ would be the mission priority. As far as the rest of the world was aware, Rachel had died in the explosion. It would take Manticore forensic teams weeks to realize she hadn't and by then, they wouldn't know where to look first, but Alec knew they'd get to Harbor Lights eventually. Her blood was at the scene.

Enough that they might think she was dead for a while. But not forever.

At some point, the threat would be real and Alec didn't know how he was going to tell the difference.

XXX

There was every possibility Max could run into Alec, though for his sake, she hoped not. What would it mean if Rachel was still in a coma for a month? For that matter, even as Max climbed the steps to the hospital doors, she wondered if Logan Cale would still be there himself.

If it had taken Max a month to recover from her bullet wound, she assumed Logan would still be nursing the painkillers for some time to come. That was provided he even had feeling left in his body after a bullet to the back.

The main lobby was bustling with people, some with injuries, in spite of the fact that it wasn't the Emergency Room entrance, which was actually accessed from the side of the building on the lower level. Max remembered the last time she'd been in the Lobby after Bruno's explosion, the first time it occurred to her what Alec's name should be.

What was it really? Henry? Jack? Francis? How could you properly name a baby anyway? They didn't do anything but scream and sit around chubby. Alec was _so_ not a Stephen.

"Did you have an appointment?" a nurse asked. She had a phone in one hand and was typing with another. Apparently, she had to do admin _and_ clean bed pans. It actually made Max's job seem appealing.

"I'm here to see a patient. Logan Cale?"

"C-A-L-E?" she asked.

Max hadn't even considered how to spell it. "Sure."

"Left almost a month ago."

"He only got here a month ago."

"Then it was a short trip," she said, dismissing Max. "Next person?"

They'd probably moved him to another hospital or set up some expensive home care.

Either way, she had no other reason to be at Harbor Lights. Yet she kept standing there, watching the elevator.

"Miss, did you need anything else?"

"No," Max insisted. "I'm leaving."

Once the first leg got moving, the other followed, but she didn't go to her bike.

As she stepped onto the elevator and hit '2' she asked herself a beray of angry questions. What are you doing? What the fuck are you thinking? Why aren't you stopping? being chief amongst them. But the questions meant nothing as she got off the elevator and headed down the hall toward the last place she'd seen Rachel and Alec.

The hallways were shorter when she wasn't in excruciating pain, yet at the same time, every step she took seemed like it was in slow motion. A few feet more and she'd have the answer to a question she hadn't really allowed herself to form in her mind.

She was both relieved and disappointed when she walked into the room and he wasn't there. The first step through the doorway assaulted her with mixed messages. One patient, dead to the world made her feel like she was in the wrong place, but the feel of the place was the same, something about the way the air moved and smelled told her that it was their room and there were no significant changes. So where were they?

In spite of her excellent eyesight, it took Max a second to realize who she was actually seeing. The patient's golden blonde, curly hair fell over part of her face, but the upturned nose was familiar. Rachel. He'd changed her appearance, Max realized, though there would be nothing Alec would be able to do to prevent intense scrutiny. Nevertheless, it worked for a second. Maybe that would be all he needed. Obviously, they hadn't been found.

Everything about the girl looked wrong. From her hair color to the way she just lay there, on her side, as though she was just sleeping. Though probably just one in a series of positions to avoid bed sores, this one looked absolutely natural. Her arm curled up near her mouth as though she were a child in the middle of a nap that may choose to suck her thumb at any moment. Someone purposely put her upper arm in that position.

Did it make it easier for Alec when it looked like she would wake up at any moment? It seemed cruel, but maybe it was completely unintentional. Maybe it was comforting and Max was being oversensitive. Certainly, it was none of her business.

She wasn't even supposed to be there, looking around the otherwise empty room paid for, no doubt, through the $29,000 she'd left for Alec. Both of the other beds were neatly made, as though they were expecting patients at any moment and Max couldn't help hoping that only meant Alec was the first man in the world to clean up after himself and not that he wasn't sleeping.

Max sat down in Alec's chair, the one positioned right next to Rachel, the only bed she'd seen him use.

If Rachel's eyes were open, Max would be able to see right into them. Only the position of her pillow kept her jaw closed, maintaining the illusion that she might just sit up and laugh at any moment.

Even the three occasions she'd been in the same room with Rachel, the hair color was glaringly wrong and made her feel like a doll or mannequin more than a human being. Her hair didn't give a hint to who she really was, but then, neither did her chart. Nothing was natural about the girl except her hands, fingernails slightly grown out, but obviously well manicured. Max had been trained to take in every detail of her surroundings, but it was no longer fully automatic. She wanted to know what the girl was like in the center of Alec's mystery.

Was she the reason that they'd been brought into the dangerous lives they'd been living? Or an innocent caught in the crossfire?

The only thing obvious was that Alec loved her. Whoever she was.

XXX

Cold water poured over his head and trickled down his body as the weak spray in the doctor's shower shot pathetically at its full force. It was inefficient and frustrating, but Alec was used to it. He braced himself against the wall as the water ran over him.

"Do you love me, Simon?" he heard Rachel's voice whisper in his ear and he closed his eyes to see her.

It didn't matter that she wasn't real, he answered the question the same as always, "Of course I do."

He could feel her caress his face and leaned into was new. Terrifying in its implications and but so, so welcome. After more than a week of just talking to a shell, he could feel her again.

"You're not really here," he told both himself and her as he reached forward to caress her back, only to have her dodge him.

"How do you even know what love is?" Rachel asked, as though he hadn't tried to change the subject. "Did Manticore teach you?"

They taught the word love by handing out chocolate bars. Alec liked Rachel more than he liked Hershey's products. He liked Rachel more than he liked everything. Still, he knew she was right. When she said love, it meant something deeper, something he didn't understand and couldn't really place.

But still, he couldn't say no. Not when she asked him outright. He wanted to make her happy.

"Then why are you letting me die?"

Her eyes dug into his and Alec's eyelids flew open, trying to focus on the sandy cement of the wall in front of him, but she wouldn't disappear. "I'm not," he insisted. "You'll be fine."

"But you're leaving me."

That, he couldn't argue with. Just the fact that he was staring at her animated face when she was actually down the hall, lying still in her hospital bed was another step in the wrong direction.

It had all started when he stopped sleeping, his waking and sleeping life merged, creating a not-exactly-reality that Alec wasn't sure how to deal with. Sometimes, it was nice, like Rachel was right there with him.

Other times, when he could hear her voice as he stared at the even rise and fall of her chest, it only made him want to die quicker. But he couldn't. Not yet. He didn't have enough money to make sure she was taken care of.

His days had become strategically unroutine. Once he left Rachel's room, he never did the same thing at the same time any two days in a row. But he almost always had to get food, shower, and scout out the area.

He knew every sector checkpoint, every weak link in the fence and had several places in mind in case he needed fast cash.

His nights were another story. Sometimes, he'd spend the whole night with Rachel. Talking, telling her that stuff about himself that he'd never been brave enough to say before. Sometimes, he tried to act like things had never changed, but he could never look at her then because the hair he'd strategically dyed would glimmer in the light, reminding him how impossible it was to pretend.

Sometimes he just wanted to put them both out of their misery.

It was hard to say how long he had left. The vertigo was worse. He'd stopped trying to sleep, but hallucinations came to him anyway. The whole world became like a lucid dream he couldn't wake up from. Things happened from his past. People spoke to him. Lydecker. Sandoval. 513. 211. Berrisford. Director Renfro.

Only Rachel stayed.

At some point, he figured, he would stop realizing she wasn't real. Maybe he'd even die happy, forgetting she was in danger. Or even the fact that he was dying at all.

Loud vibrations filled the space around him, rattling the metal of the folding chair outside the shower stall. Alec rinsed the remaining soap from his skin, stepped around Rachel and through the heavy plastic curtain to grab the towel he'd liberated from the hospital store room.

By the time he was dry enough to answer the phone, it stopped ringing.

Occasionally, he got wrong numbers, but this was potential money. He returned the call immediately.

"Yeah?" a gruff, familiar voice answered.

"Jimmy. It's Alec."

"Got something for you if you're interested."

"You know me."

"Yeah. High danger, high pay off. Our little friend Maxie know how crazy you are yet?"

"That's how she likes it," Alec insisted, not bothering to correct the extremely wrong assumption that he even knew if Max was still alive, let alone had some kind of connection to her.

Jimmy liked Max. A lot. Alec suspected she was the only reason he even got these calls. "Well, you let her know I said she could do better."

"Jimmy, you're a lateral move, at best." It wouldn't be right to let Jimmy believe he had even a glimmer of a shot with Max. It would only create unrealistic expectations.

Plus, Alec liked to think she was a lesbian.

"So what's the job?" he asked.

XXX

With every moment that Alec didn't show up, Max could feel the walls begin to close in around her. She kept expecting Rachel's eyes to snap open and ask what she was doing there.

There was no easy answer, mostly since morbid curiosity didn't just roll right off the tongue. She'd wanted to know what happened to them and obviously, the answer was nothing. They'd been in a holding pattern. There was no reason to stay and yet Max had sat down, placing herself exactly where she'd always seen Alec lay his head next to Rachel's.

Her eyes traveled the direction his would, vicariously living in the moment with him.

A television set peaked out from behind the open door.

Suddenly, the picture of their lives crystallized. Alec in his chair next to Rachel, watching TV "together." What else could they do, for days and weeks?

The sudden, intense rush of empathy felt wrong and intrusive. She shouldn't know about any of this without an invitation and she didn't have one. Alec hadn't wanted her to know anything about him.

Now, she knew too much.

XXX

No sum of money was enough for him, because whatever he got was all Rachel would have when the time came.

Slowly, he was starting to make the friends he'd wanted in the first place. Not like Max, who knew way too much about him. Business partners. Contacts. People like Jimmy, who could help him acquire his objective without showing up in his hospital room with their guts hanging out only to walk out the door twelve hours later.

People who paid in full.

Every expense pained him, but some were necessary. Clothes, for his sense of smell. A TV, for his sense of sanity. When he could just hold Rachel's hand and dive into a music video or action movie, things made sense. They came into balance.

"Something's different," Rachel whispered in his ear as he walked back down the hallway toward their hospital room.

Anticipation zipped through Alec's blood. There _was_ something. A different feel in the air. Even though he purposely changed the order of his day, his surroundings were always the same, almost like life at Manticore.

Nothing was different in the outer structures. Nurses still stared at him blankly as he passed, doctors didn't even notice his presence. The bustle that was white noise to others hit like individual, staccato notes in his ears. A pained yell. Regretful muttering. Pleas for family members to hold on.

All different, yet exactly the same. Nothing was out of place except the hair on the back of his neck, under the collared shirt that hid his barcode. He was familiar with the instinct to run, Manticore had taught their soldiers to be in tune with their surroundings to anticipate threats.

But this wasn't fight or flight.

Instead, he was propelled forward, rounding the corner toward his room rapidly.

Rachel was exactly as he left her and his heart plummeted. Alec hadn't gotten as far as considering the reason for his excitement, or wondering what he thought might happen when he got to the room.

The change, when he finally noticed it, was sitting on his chair next to his bed. Money. Green and tattered, had seen better days, but he knew exactly where it came from.

Max was alive.

Alec slid the pile of bills into his pocket. He didn't really care how much she'd short changed him.

XXX

The whole problem with hiding a shockingly beautiful motorcycle in an alley behind a dumpster was that often times people threw garbage-type substances in its general direction.

"Poor darling," Max crooned, gently wiping the remains of well-used coffee grinds from the leather seat. If not for the pulse, she could have probably gone her whole life without having to park her treasured motorcycle next to a dumpster.

But then, if not for the pulse, Lydecker probably would have dragged her back to Manticore in 2010.

Win some, lose some.

"Well, that's disgusting."

Max stiffened, but kept cleaning. It wasn't the biggest shock to find him right outside the building he'd apparently been living in for the last month. She wasn't sure what to say, though, so she went with, "Hey."

"Hey?" Alec asked, like she was speaking a foreign language.

"Like 'hi.' More casual."

"Like you casually walked out of the hospital a few hours after surgery? Congrats on being alive, by the way. How's the shoulder?"

Shit. She wasn't supposed to be out and about for another two months according to the doctor's schedule. "Fine. Guess the doctor was off in his guesstimate."

"Apparently," Alec agreed, stepping around her bike and into her line of vision, forcing her to look at him. "Jesus, Max, what were you thinking?"

What she'd been thinking and what she was willing to admit were worlds different, so Max shrugged off the question. "Don't really remember."

"Yeah, right. Delirium? That's what we're going with?"

"I was _really_ out of it. I'd just had surgery."

"So you _do_ remember. How'd you even get on the bike in your condition?"

"Guardian angel." Max tossed the ripped shirt she'd been using to clean off her bike back into the dumpster she'd found it in and swung her leg over the seat. Quicker than Max thought he could move, Alec was in front of her, blocking her exit, a leg on either side of her front wheel. "God, Alec, what's your problem?"

The anger melted from his face and he smiled, like they were best friends all of a sudden. "Thought you changed my name."

"Thought I never knew it," she challenged. What _was_ his real name? She wanted to ask, but didn't want to get into it. She'd waded too deeply into the Alec mystery already. There were other problems in her life, all more significant to her existence.

"Maybe I like my new one better."

A peace offering, she realized. "What do you want?" she asked, relenting.

Fire lit inside his eyes and Max couldn't help feeling she'd walked right into his trap. "How 'bout a ride?" he asked.

Of course. It all came back to the Ninja. At least she could understand the motivation. "Where you headed?"

"You tell me," he said, rounding the side of the bike to squeeze on behind her.

"Condition."

"What's that?" he asked, wrapping his arms around her waist, probably ready to agree to anything if it meant something different to do with his day.

"You steal _nothing_ from the place we're going. Got it? Now or ever."

"Do I have to make this decision now?" he asked.

Max elbowed him. Hard.

"Fine. Okay."

XXX

When the motor roared to life and she swung around the first curve, Alec felt like he was leaving everything else behind him. It was hard to even think in the inertia she created. It felt more like a dream than anything he'd experienced in the last couple weeks, but at that same time, he was more awake. Alert to every sound of the city as they tore past and the hum of the motor against his ass. The warmth of Max's hips against the inside of his knees.

Completely worth paying lip service to Max's meaningless agreement.

It wasn't like he couldn't change his mind later. Telling Max that he wasn't going to do something in no way made him physically incapable. Saying one thing and doing another was pretty much what he'd been trained to do his entire life.

Lying. It was like thieving in that it was supposed to be "wrong" but it was far easier and took no physical effort.

Mentally, it involved some acrobatics if you did it too much, but in this case, it couldn't be simpler.

What he didn't understand was that Max had to have been aware of the fact that people lied. Thieves, especially. So the fact that she was taking him in spite of the obvious pitfalls meant, what? She trusted him?

Probably the 'saving her life' thing.

He was used to people trusting him because he was placed in a situation they would have no reason not to believe every word out of his mouth.

Max shouldn't have been one of them. He was actively using her to alleviate the anxiety, hallucinations and numbness that infiltrated his every waking moment. Thanks to insomnia, they were his only moments. She _knew_. At least part of it. He could tell the instant she agreed to the bike trip that she probably had a good idea why he was doing it, but he hadn't cared. There was time to kill until the job that night and having a conversation and spending it with a real person was too tempting to ignore.

Just a few hours to feel the wind whip through his hair and around his head. Have Max yell at him about gun control and actually utilize his knowledge of the U.S. Constitution for more or less practical purposes.

Simple enough fantasy if she let it happen. Just let all the other voices fade to the background. Max and her motorcycle were easy to focus on. It was almost like TV. Better, in a way, because he could interact and feel a part of the world that really existed.

The problem was, she was _doing it again_. Feeling sorry for him. Given the fact that his life really couldn't be bleaker, Alec couldn't help wondering if he was even more insane to wish she wouldn't. He was glad she was back, relieved she was alive and ecstatic to be speeding around Seattle on her bike, but the idea of her inside his hospital room getting a first hand look at the way he lived needled at him.

Of course, she didn't know yet that he'd been up there, or that he'd jumped three stories to catch up with her. Maybe they could both play pretend.

As they approached the Sector Checkpoint, Alec expected her to slow down, which was nuts, since she seemed to find brakes decorative at best. At the last possible moment, she came to a sudden and abrupt halt that sent him flying into her back.

"Sorry," she said, though her laugh really ruined the apology. Alec wondered if she was this sadistic with everyone or if she left it for her charity work.

"Sector passes?"

Max dug into the pocket of her leather jacket to flash a badge he couldn't see. "Jam Pony Messenger."

He'd never heard of the company. It was either a front for her other, more illegal, activity, or a side job she held down just to get a Sector Pass. His own had been a bitch to get his hands on and it was only a temp.

"Okay, you guys are clear."

"What would you have done if I hadn't had one?" Alec whispered in her ear, curious.

She didn't say anything, but something about the way she revved her engine and took off felt like a pretty clear answer anyway.

XXX

When she decided to head to Logan's penthouse to look for him, she hadn't planned on bringing company. Then, when she decided to let Alec tag along, Max hadn't really considered the fact that she couldn't exactly drag him up the wall with her.

If she had gear with her, maybe he could harness in and follow, but as it was, it looked like they were going to have to do things the old fashioned way and walk right through the front door.

Even the concept made her itchy.

She blamed Alec.

Of course, he was having a great time, hugging her to him at every turn and anticipating every move as though he couldn't wait to go faster or take the turns harder.

He'd probably be a lot more fun if he got his drink on.

When she got to the parking garage for Fogel Towers, she could hear Alec's quick inhalation of surprise as she actually drove down the ramp. Of course, unlike every other person she'd ever met, he actually seemed _excited_ when she drove right around the guard rail, forcing them both to pull up their legs and still nearly scratching the paint off her siding.

"Nice," he said, probably not loud enough that he intended her to hear it, making it even more of a compliment.

She pulled into a parking spot and hovered, not quite knowing where to go from there. Did rich people not steal bikes? Could she leave it in broad florescent lighting and expect it to be there when she got back?

Or should she carry a tire with her?

"Where the hell _are_ we?" Alec asked, blindsided, no doubt, by the sudden show of class that was so prevalent in Sector Nine.

"Parking garage," Max said, putting the kickstand into place and dismounting. She couldn't resist throwing on a chain, just in case some classless relative was visiting a rich uncle… or Alec beat her back to the garage somehow.

"I can see that, yes, thank you. Aren't those kind of… 2008?"

"Not in Sector Nine."

"Yeah, right, not everything in Sector Nine has perfectly clean floors. My shoes are squeaking, Max, listen to this!" Alec showed off the noises, pulling off a grotesque approximation of what had to be the moon walk, but sounded like a parade of dying geese.

Max couldn't decide if her eyes or ears hurt more. "Yes. God, please stop."

He did, but not without comment. "Is _that_ your new name for me?"

Ignoring him, Max headed to the elevator. The last thing she wanted to hear was how she should scream it next time, which was a common male follow up to this line of conversation. Been there, learned from that.

Alec caught up to her as the bell dinged and stepped inside cautiously, like he was scared the little tiny room wouldn't be willing to let him back out.

She didn't ride elevators much either, so she hit the "PH" for Penthouse a few times, just for fun.

Alec stepped over to copy her and realized where they were headed. "Seriously?" he asked.

XXX

He loved the way the place smelled. Like lemons and pine trees instead of blood and sweat. It was a huge relief to his nose.

The idea of Max hanging out in the building, or, in fact, any building other than a biker bar or someone else's private bank vault, was hard to wrap his mind around.

"Whose place did you say this was?"

"I didn't."

He knew that, of course, but he was curious. Max had rich friends? It wasn't like he'd gone through her rolodex to catalogue them all by tax bracket, but Jimmy wasn't exactly rolling in it. He didn't know any of her other friends except… "Logan!" he zeroed in on the name and knew by her expression he'd nailed it. The guy who'd been Rachel's roommate for exactly three hours before their room exploded.

Max said she'd robbed his place, which suddenly made a _lot_ more sense, though why she'd bring him there, knowing the temptation was a good question. Why Logan would invite _her_ back was another.

Though as she exited the elevator in front of him, Alec had a pretty good idea.

Of course, when she started picking the lock, he had to adjust his opinion. Maybe _invited_ wasn't exactly the word. "Uhh, Max, correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this considered rude?"

"Well, sure, if he was home."

The door cracked open.

"I'm pretty sure breaking into a friend's house when they aren't home is actually frowned upon in polite circles."

"You can spank me later," she promised, assaulting his mind with images. As she walked through the door, she threw a slow smile over her shoulder. "Coming?"

He blinked. "Hmm? Yeah."

XXX

Logan's penthouse apartment was empty and from the smell of things, no one had bothered to empty his fridge when he got shot. Which was gross and Max would totally take care of it herself if she didn't have an enhanced sense of smell.

"God, what _is_ that?" Alec asked, holding his nose. "You leave the body behind last time, Maxie?"

"Guess he didn't plan to get shot and bail on his place for a month."

"Doesn't he have _people_ for this?"

"Clean it yourself if it bugs you so bad." Honestly, she wasn't sure what his problem was. She had to have at least twice the scent capacity and somehow, she was still standing. "He'll probably have to have people for everything when he moves back."

A back injury would require rehab no matter the condition of his spinal cord, but paralysis was another matter. Would Logan need physical assistance for the rest of his life? Someone to help him get around and do menial, normal things everyone else took for granted? Even when Max had seizures, she'd rather just stay in the privacy of her bedroom than ask for help. Just the idea of not being able to move was such a fundamental part of life that she preferred not to consider all the awful possibilities.

"At least he's conscious," Alec said, not really to her but the world at large. His hand dropped away from his nose. Maybe he'd acclimated. Or maybe he was used to worse.

"Did you check out his TV?" Max asked, pointing toward the living room.

Bounce back in his step, Alec followed her lead to the wall mounted, seventy inch plasma screen that decorated Logan's living room. "This has to be worth serious coin. This and all that computer stuff," he gestured toward the computer room she'd quickly ushered him past.

"You're not stealing his electronics."

"Right, because I promised not to, so if I did, it would be like, illegal or something."

"No, because if you do, I'll twist your spine like a pretzel."

Weirdly, he seemed pretty happy with that response, like the threat of violence was some kind of secret code. It wasn't. She'd beat his ass for sure if he tried something.

"Plus, I'm pretty sure even you wouldn't want to steal a paralyzed guy's only form of entertainment." And work. Even without legs, Logan's monster computer system would still be hitting up contacts and trying to rid the world of evil and grime.

Which was why she was there, though she didn't need to share that part of the deal with Alec. The second Logan got back from whatever fancy rehab facility his folks sent him, she wanted to know what the Eyes Only informant network could tell her about the disk she'd stolen from the creepy building Alec found his sniper rifle.

"What's the point of being here if we can't take anything?" he asked.

Max wandered over to the smooth, ultra modern surface of Logan's coffee table and picked up the remote control at easy reach from the couch. "Pay per view?" she asked, tossing him the remote.

PPV had been the new movie theater ever since the pulse. Features went directly to a television set with a special hook up that, of course, many people couldn't afford. Entertainment was expensive and most people watched re-runs on their analogue TV sets, twisting dry cleaner hangers into bunny ears.

"Wow, Max, with friends like you, who needs relatives?"

"Do you want to watch or not?"

He settled into the couch and flipped on the TV. "Sex or violence?"

"You have to choose?" she asked.

"Good point." He started flipping through menus, until he noticed her still hovering. "Aren't you going to sit down?"

"Yeah, in a sec…" Max didn't know how to explain what she was doing, so she didn't bother, just left the room and ducked into the computer alcove. Logan's desk was messier than the rest of the house. The last time she'd used his computer, she hadn't bothered to pay any attention. She still wouldn't, except she had to find a post it note for the disk. An empty, now probably permanently stained coffee mug sat next to a pile of notes and files. They sat on top of a book, on top of a pen that kept everything off kilter. The post-its, she finally found out, had slipped to the floor.

After all the aggravation, Max kind of felt Logan owed it to her to let her do a quick search through his Internet files for news about Vogelsang. Though, ideally, he just wouldn't notice.

XXX

Alec didn't choose a porn. Partly because Max would come back at any moment, partly because it felt like Rachel and Lydecker were _right there_ looking at him. Plus, he wasn't sure where Logan's bathroom was… it would be a hassle.

The only movie that really appealed to Alec was an animated feature about some kind of rodent trying to make it big in his chosen field. Obviously, it was a comedy. He watched a lot of comedy, to brush up on his verbal skills and figure out how the real world worked.

But, when Max came back into the room, he didn't know how to explain why he'd chosen a Disney movie.

So, he'd gone with an action flick and proceeded to bite his tongue through the most ridiculous fight sequence he'd ever seen.

"I taught you better than that," Lydecker agreed, which was just fucking great.

Alec hit pause and went to find Max. She was obviously up to something, since she hadn't come to Fogel Towers penthouse for the smell, but he didn't particularly care about the details. She needed Logan's sweet computer set up for something.

"Hey, did you ever find the guy that was blackmailing you?" Alec asked, letting his feet clomp against the wood floor to announce his presence.

Max quickly shifted to another screen and turned to him. "He won't be a problem anymore."

There was a confidence and finality to the statement that got his attention and sent chills down his spine. Maybe he and Max had more in common than he'd thought.

"What movie did you pick?" she asked, shutting off the computer and getting up from Logan's desk.

"The one with guns."

"Your favorite."

Max brushed past him to get back to the TV, but Alec turned too quickly as the world spun around him. It usually went away in a few seconds.

"But someday," Rachel said, "It won't. You'll keep spinning until _poof_. I'll be right there with you, Simon. We'll both be dying at the same time."

"No," he whispered, bracing himself against the wall he could feel, but no longer see.

"Give up the girl, 494. Everything can go back to the way it was. You won't even remember this," Sandoval instructed in his ear. "Is that clear, Alec?"

"Alec? Are you okay?"

Max, he realized, recognizing the voice before his vision returned to reality with him.

"Yeah, of course. Sorry. Zoning."

"Clearly…" He thought she'd leave it at that, but the concern came back into her eyes, making him bounce on his toes and lean toward the exit. "Alec, when was the last time you slept?"

"Last night," he lied. "Well, this morning, really. My schedule is kind of out of wack." He borrowed the phrase from a doctor he'd overheard in the locker room, trying to lend authenticity to the story. The key to a good lie was minute detail that was impossible to confirm.

Max didn't seem to really buy it, but neither could she completely dismiss it, so in the end, Alec got what he wanted. She headed over to the couch and started up the movie.

XXX

It was hard to concentrate on terribly choreographed violence with the smell of rotting rich people food in her nose and Alec's constant twitching in her peripheral vision.

Most drug manufactures had stopped production after the pulse. It took a lot green to get the Ritalin psychiatrists used to give to kids like candy when math couldn't hold their interest. Apparently, Alec could use a hit or ten.

"I give up," Max said after awhile. She jumped to her feet and headed to the kitchen, ready to scrub out Logan's refrigerator. Before she could put a hand on the door, Alec was right next to her, holding the door shut.

"Don't," he insisted.

The temptation to shove him across the room was shocking. It wasn't often that she felt it anymore, after all the years she'd spent faking life as an ordinary. Pretending she wasn't as strong or fast had become almost second nature and it was strange to actively shove the impulse to throw Alec across the room just so she could clean.

"What's your problem? Watch the movie."

"We were both watching," he said, but he was still fidgeting like a junkie and there had to be more to it.

If there had been any way for Alec to believe her shoulder had completely healed, she would have enjoyed beating the truth out of him.

"Are you eating?" Max asked next.

"God, what are you, my commanding officer?" he asked.

There was something off about his response. Not because it sounded wrong, but too _right_, but Max was too pissed off to focus on it. "Apparently somebody needs to be! You can't fucking walk straight, Alec! So you're either on something or you need something. Either way, you're getting your ass caught if you go out tonight."

"I'm sorry, are you the same girl I was talking to a second ago? Who drove her motorcycle home after surgery? You really feel comfortable having this conversation, Max?"

It was frustrating to be held to the same rules as other people, which was generally why Max didn't tell anybody her business. Obviously, it weakened her argument tremendously. "I was delirious," she insisted.

"So you say."

Obviously, he was still pissy about the issue and she wasn't going to get anywhere. "I'll be right back," she told him.

XXX

Now what? Alec was half expecting Max to head to the kitchen for a knife to threaten him with once her attempt at reason went down in flames. But she headed into Logan's office instead, coming back a few seconds later with a large black marker. The hell?

She grabbed his sleeve and yanked it up to his elbow.

The shock of it only threw him off for a second before he tried to pull away, but she followed, deftly knocking away the half-hearted attempt he made to shove her off him. "What are you _doing?"_ he finally asked.

She flicked the cap off the marker and wrote a series of numbers on his forearm. Like he needed 14 more digits attached to his body. "When you get your stupid ass in trouble…? Page me."

_When_, he noticed, not _if_. Bitch.

"Whatever, I have to head out."

"Great, see you tonight!" she said, throwing him a brilliant smile and sarcastic little two fingered wave.

He only replied with one.

XXX

Most of his jobs were absurdly easy for someone of his considerable skill and training. Even those with voices in their head and brushes with insanity. The fact that he wasn't playing with his full deck didn't matter because his competition wasn't aware he'd started with more than a few extra aces.

Unfortunately, all of his success had led Jimmy to up the ante. On the one hand, the payout was massive. But he couldn't just scale the wall. He had to talk someone into letting him through the door.

Even though he was the top of his class at Common Verbal Usage, he wasn't exactly Psy-ops.

Just approaching the building, he could tell why he'd have to go through a door. The walls were sheer, impossible to climb and even if he had gear, it was much larger than anything nearby, he'd be spotted instantly since the entire place was lit up from the inside. Probably fashionable enough in its days as an office building, but inconvenient as hell for someone wanting to break into the local mafia's lair.

Usually, Jimmy's jobs ran strictly to the autobody business. More in the destructing than the building side of things. This was a step up for him, which is how Alec knew he was making headway. Either Jimmy secretly had his fingers in more kettles than he first thought, or it was Alec's own ambition that made Jimmy look further for the easy score.

Easy for Alec, at least.

The door was thick metal, more like the opening to a vault, which, actually, was sort of a fair comparison since Alec intended to rob the place. There was a slit of a window on the door, about a foot long and an inch high and stood at approximately eye level, though Alec had to bend down slightly to see through it.

He knocked on the door and the window slid open, letting him hear the rumble of a large crowd for the first time.

"Show started hours ago."

"Not over yet, though," Alec argued blindly. He had no idea what was going on inside the heavy metal door, just that it was the first step toward getting the money he needed for Rachel.

"If you had just told me the truth, I would have never looked twice at you, Simon. I'd be safe with my grandparents back east," Rachel whispered in his ear.

He tried to ignore her, like he did everyone else.

"I'm sure there's a way to convince you to open the door," Alec said. It wasn't subtle. This man was a human key, waiting for the right combination of words to get him to let Alec through the door, but what did _he _care, really?

"Probably is," he conceded.

"I don't like this place," Rachel interrupted. "Come back to me."

Alec wouldn't look at her. He was doing this _for_ her, but she didn't get it. Never did. He tried to focus on what the doorman was saying. The guy was perfectly willing to let him in, but he was holding the door hostage for something.

Impatient, Alec pulled a few bills out of his pocket, but didn't hand them over, just dangled them in front of the tiny window. He had no idea what else to offer. Usually, his next step was threats, but it was difficult with the man behind the iron curtain.

But the door creaked open and he walked in, feeling the bribe disappear quickly from his fingers. 'Talk them into it' was a code, Alec realized. One that Jimmy had probably assumed he already understood. Whatever. He was putting the extra fifty bucks on his bill.

He cased the room, taking in the bars on the walls and large mill of people, crowding around a massive meshed area in the center of the room.

"Always know your exits," Lydecker reminded him. "Give yourself an escape route."

_Shut up! _Alec yelled inside his head. He _knew_ all that. Unfortunately, there weren't many exits. A window or two would do in a pinch, but he'd prefer to walk right back out the way he came. Every other door just led more deeply inside the structure.

A bell rang and a loud roar went up in the mill of people. It wasn't until the noise level lowered that Alec recognized what was happening. He couldn't see through anyone's back, but he would never forget the sounds of fighting.

He could even tell who would win and wasn't surprised when the crowd erupted in moments.

As he circled the room, it felt like every eye turned toward him, though it was only a few. Most were involved with every movement of the fight inside the cage in front of them. It was mostly men. The girls in the room seemed to have a specific purpose and didn't focus on the yelling around them, almost as if it didn't exist.

They were also the only ones going in and out of the doors. Obviously, they were the strategic team in charge of the event, but they wouldn't talk to anyone who didn't want to buy something. Drinks, for the most part.

Alec was _so_ willing to buy a drink. Maybe a few. He hadn't had alcohol since the glass of wine at the Berrisford's, a few weeks before the explosion. Sometimes it was strange to him, that a third of the time he'd known Rachel, she'd been in a coma. Three weeks, they'd been together. Really together, where instead of just coming over to teach her piano once a week, she'd invited him over all the time, to her father's fancy events and a few lazy days of watching TV, eating junk food and making out on the couch.

"Essential couple time," Rachel reiterated what she said at the time and Alec was glad he could see her, hear her voice even though it meant he was losing it.

He pushed through the crowd to the bar.

In his experience on the outside, which, to be fair, was limited, it was a complete waste of time to try to be inconspicuous. That wasn't the way he was designed. So he didn't wait his turn, waiting for the bartender to notice him. He slapped a fifty on the counter and stared at her chest, which were encased with sequins and didn't seem to want to stay inside her shirt.

He wasn't fully sure why she bothered with it except the way the low lighting bounced off every angle. Her breasts looked like disco balls. It wasn't hard to keep an eye on them.

In a room with fifty eyes zeroing in on her body, she turned almost immediately to meet his gaze, then moved quickly to scoop up his money.

"Now what can _I_ do for you?" she asked, tucking his money away into the tight space between her skin and sequins.

"I'm shy," he said, "I'll work up to it after a couple drinks."

"Nice," she said, like she'd heard it before, but still appreciated the effort. "So what kind of man are you? Beer? Scotch?"

"Scotch," he said. It was Berrisford's drink of choice. The way it burned down the back of Alec's throat had never seemed appealing until that moment.

XXX

Richard Vogelsang's body had been found DOA at the apartment assumed to be his place of residence, a location Max knew to be five blocks west of the Laundromat that doubled as his office. He was a private investigator. Usually, he dealt with unfaithful wives and missing drug dealers. For Max, he was trying to find the children that escaped with her or the woman who'd driven her beyond that final barricade.

After a month, there was a good chance the crime scene was long gone and evidence destroyed, but Max made the trek anyway.

Her information had gotten the guy his fingernails ripped out and a bullet to the brain stem.

His body had been found by Marcus Vogelsang, who, had he waited around to get the coroner's report, would have known that the kill shot came from a gun at least fifty meters away.

He'd been tortured by one party and taken out by another.

Max tried not to immediately blame Lydecker, but it was a minimal effort at best. Torturer or executioner, he'd played both roles in the drama of her life growing up. Marcus said that Lydecker was looking for Vogelsang _after_ he'd been killed. Surely, if Lydecker had shot him, he wouldn't have felt the need to look for him. He wouldn't have cared enough to cast away suspicion with the exercise, he seemed to find license for whatever actions he favored under the guise of 'national security.'

If, on the other hand, he was the torturer in the scenario, why wouldn't he know about the shooter? Either the shooting occurred after the torture. Or, Lydecker had someone else do the dirty work and hadn't been at the location at the time of the shooting.

There was a small voice that reasoned that Lydecker might have nothing to do with any of it, but it was easily shushed. Who else, after all?

Like Marcus said, she was the only client he'd had that would draw that type of attention.

If he hadn't charged out the nose, she might have felt a little worse about the fact that she'd gotten him killed.

But she certainly hadn't asked him to dig up her own barcode. It seemed like Dick Vogelsang had gotten too involved for his own good. Definitely too involved when it came to the information he'd left for his son, sending him to Max's door step.

If he'd waited and seen the police report, Marcus would have known it wasn't her. Wouldn't he? Or did the role of the shooter still fit? Who, besides her, would want to silence Vogelsang from whatever information he might have been spilling?

Like most apartment buildings in the area, the bullet hole was covered over in plastic, visible from the street for someone with 2000/20 genetically enhanced vision.

There were a few buildings that the shot could have come from and Max didn't bother going through the front doors to get a level glance at them. The apartment was on the top floor, so she took what, to her, was a hop, onto the fire escape, climbed the steps and vaulted onto the roof.

She wasn't stupid enough to contact anyone involved with the case to ask questions, but it didn't stop her from poking around at the scene. There were really only two locations that worked for a sniper. Most of the buildings nearby were too tall and close, they didn't have the right angle unless Vogelsang had actually leaned his head out the window.

Even _he _hadn't been that much of an idiot.

So either the killer had hidden out on the fire escape of an apartment building across the way _or _they'd set up in the other possibility, the building behind it, lower to the ground and just barely visible, yet still almost on level with her eye. It was a much further shot. Limited range of motion. Very difficult access.

Unless you happened to be transgenic.

XXX

It was tempting to continue sipping scotch while he stared down the shirt of an attractive woman and listened to the familiar, almost pleasant sounds of someone getting the shit kicked out of them in the background.

But the need for money pushed from deep inside and soon, he started fidgeting.

"What do you think of The Mangler?"

"What?" Alec asked, turning to the man on the bar stool next to him, surprised he'd seemed open enough to invite conversation.

"He's reigning champion in these parts lately. Put any money down on it?"

"Don't spend money unless it's a sure thing," Alec said. "Seems too much like gambling." Which, of course, he assumed was the basic point of the spectacle.

Amused, his neighbor held out a hand. "Reagan," the man said, introducing himself.

"Alec," he returned, simultaneously enjoying the feel of using his 'real' name and wanting to keep it a secret. There was something so revealing about telling a stranger that it made him feel uncomfortable.

Of course, everybody was a stranger. At this point, just by shaking the man's hand, Reagan had become one of Alec's closest friends.

"Nice to meet you. You a fighter?" Reagan asked.

There was no obvious reason for the question and Alec wondered where it came from. "We'll see after a couple drinks."

"You're not watching the fight, just wondering if you were psyching up for your match," Reagan explained.

It was observant. Too observant, as far as Alec was concerned. "Just distracted," he claimed instead. Another truth.

"Tell him the whole truth," Rachel whispered. "See what he would think if he knew you could kill him in less than four seconds."

He didn't have to talk to Reagan at all, though. The bartendress returned with another drink and he decided it was time to move on.

XXX

The idea that Vogelsang'd been playing her, that he'd obviously had his son put a tracking device on her bike, concerned Max. It made her a lot less sorry he was dead, but it made her wonder who else had been privy to the information he'd gathered over the time she'd known him.

Plus, it was a problem. She was a good judge of character. And yes, he seemed somewhat shady, in that he would take any job that came his way and wasn't shy about taking pictures of any disgusting scenario he was paid to investigate, but he hadn't seemed like a spy.

But in post-pulse Seattle, an opportunist could fall into anything.

Or fall victim to anyone.

Whether it was another transgenic, Lydecker or someone else entirely, Max wasn't convinced there still wasn't someone on her tail.

The smartest, safest option was simple, but not easy. What if it _was_ another transgenic, under the misguided impression they were helping her? But what if Marcus Vogelsang had tipped someone about how to find her?

The apartment itself told her nothing except that it was a high powered bullet that went through the glass, but that only re-affirmed what she'd already known.

It was time to leave Seattle.

XXX

"Is that what I taste like, Simon?" Rachel asked, wheedling her way into his brain as he pushed Cassie, the disco ball breasted bartender, up against the wall in the back room during her self-created break.

Cassie tasted like alcohol, which was nothing like Rachel and she was dancing her tongue around his like an acrobat so he wished Rachel would shut up already so he could concentrate and keep up.

He had to listen in on the room next to him, pay attention to what Cassie was up to and on the way back, he'd had to mentally map out the area while her hands were all over him.

There was no way he was close to sharp to stay on the job during any other mission. Manticore would have pulled him out of the op if he'd been half this compromised, but they weren't in charge anymore.

Every moment would only get worse as his brain slowly melted out through his ears. Alec had to take the opportunity in front of him for a significant payout. Enough for Rachel to live who knows how long if she had someone taking care of her. He would simply have to muster up the sanity to make it happen.

"I miss my daddy," Rachel whispered in his ear, overwhelming the sound of the whimpers Cassie made into his mouth and destroying the initial enjoyment he was getting out of the distraction.

"The girl's collateral damage, 494," Sandoval joined in, dancing in front of his eyes even as he closed them.

Cassie's hands moved into his pants and he pressed closer, squeezing her body to the wall to prevent her finding out that he didn't react to her as he had to Rachel, the prostitute in the alley, or Max.

He assumed it had more to do with his deteriorating health, rather than a lack of magnetism on her part. Since from the feel of things, her magnets were going full blast.

Just that thought made him react a little more, which would have been nice if he could step into a closet and fix the problem, but since he was just waiting for the people in the other room to clear out… Ah, there. Silence.

"What?" Cassie whispered as he pulled away.

"I'm sorry," he told her, and cut off her oxygen.

The direct access to the stash lay through a metal door and fifteen armed guards. Not impossible. But would be suicide to a regular human. So the money tip Jimmy got, and passed on to his new #1 B&E broker, was the weak point in the wall in the kitchen situated between the bar and the supply closet. On a normal day, it closed at 10.

The third panel in the ceiling opened up to an air duct that went up two floors. Straight up. With the same sheer metallic surface parks used to make children's slides. Most people would have needed climbing equipment. Jimmy probably assumed that Alec would be using something of that nature.

Alec didn't intend to be caught, so he didn't care that it might look funny if he could break in without the little hassles that would trouble your every day burglar.

A very large fan blocked the way about ten feet up. Functionally, it was there because the kitchen was easily the place

"Can't go any faster, 494?" Sandoval asked. "513 made it in 20 seconds."

"513 isn't here. Neither are you." Alec had lost track of whether what he said actually went out through his mouth or just remained in his head with his hallucinations.

He kept climbing, finally reaching the turn in the air duct that would let him crawl along solid ground.

"You're still gonna fuck it up."

"Geez, Max."

She was lying in the duct above him, relaxed. Hair dangled toward him as she looked down, amused, apparently, by his certain doom.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" His anger overcame what little remained of his sanity. Apparently, yelling at hallucinations always made them go away.

"I'm just trying to help you, asshole."

He pushed himself up and through her body, finally leaving the vertical shaft and letting himself rest for a second in the divergent air shaft. It was much more difficult than it should have been. The muscles in his arms were trembling with the effort. Not enough to see, but enough to keep him worried, and, hopefully, keep him sane.

"Because your weak ass arms are going to make me up and disappear?" Max scoffed.

"Did I ask your fucking opinion?" Alec snapped, "Leave me alone!"

"Why don't you ever tell me to leave you alone?" Rachel asked.

Alec crawled away from the question. Seeing Max disturbed him on a level that Rachel didn't. That Lydecker didn't. Barring a miraculous recovery or completely disastrous discovery, neither of those people could actually walk into his life at any moment.

But it seemed like Max's favorite activity.

Which only blurred his reality lines even further. Had she actually been there today? He stopped moving suddenly, ripping the sleeve from his arm to stare at the numbers he'd already memorized. It was proof, wasn't it?

"Can you even trust your eyes, though?" Max asked. "Maybe you wrote that yourself. Maybe you were imagining me. I'm probably dead. I never made it after the surgery."

He hauled himself forward faster. He wouldn't engage them anymore. His arms were aching and his eyes strained to see in the darkness around him. In a simple job like this, it was concerning. His brain was beginning to affect his body. When his body gave out, so did his usefulness to Rachel.

"Oh, Simon, that's so sweet!"

"God, Alec, you're such a drama queen."

Both of their voices echoed in his head and their faces shook in front of him as he slammed roughly through the grate in the air duct. He just had to get into the office, grab the book from the safe, if he could get them to shut up long enough to hear the click of the tumblers and then he could be on his way.

He could check on Rachel and call the number on his arm.

He could see for himself if she was real or at least compare her to the other hallucinations that dominated his thoughts.

It was a good plan.

One that required every bit of Alec's focus on the strain of his biceps and triceps as they lowered his body through the grating in the air circulation vent head first, then his abdominals as he carefully somersaulted, allowing himself to dangle briefly in midair before letting go.

For just a second, every muscle released for the first time in recent memory and Alec recognized, almost immediately, that it was a mistake. The tension had been keeping him together, kept him going every moment he'd been awake.

In that instant, he lost control. White light exploded inside his head and ran down the synapses of his central nervous system. It was a feeling he recognized immediately from childhood, even as he hit the floor, his body jerking as his limbs flailed.

A seizure. The last sign that whatever drugs Manticore had pumped into his blood stream were gone.

He didn't have time to feel anything beyond the realization that it was over. No regret, disappointment or relief. The voices and images were gone. The involuntary movements of his body became irrelevant.

The lights behind his eyes quickly burned to darkness.

To Be Continued…


End file.
